


The Professional and the Pirate

by Defira



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Deaf Character, F/M, SIS Agent - Freeform, Smuggler as SIS Agent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2019-09-23 12:47:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 38,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17080598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: Thiare Tana is an earnest- if somewhat overzealous- SIS agent, striving to make a name for herself in the overworked Counter-Piracy Task Force. Between the Black Suns gaining more ground on Coruscant, the Exchange taking advantage of the Hutt humiliation on Makeb, or any number of smaller criminal outfits looking to establish a foothold across the galaxy, she has her work cut out for her. It doesn't help that her colleagues' willingness to be flexible with the law is at odds with her determination to follow the rulebook to the letter.Paxton Rall is one of the most notorious pirates in the galaxy, known for his charismatic path of destruction as he rushes from one target to the next like a gleeful child in a candy store. He is a murderer, a thief, a cad with a thousand broken hearts in his wake as he traipses across the galaxy looking for his next grand conquest.Fate puts the two of them on the same path. Neither of them wants to share.





	1. Port Nowhere

Thiare hated Port Nowhere. 

There was, quite literally, nothing to like about the place. The smell? Like slightly sour alcohol, and the oil and salt and rot from a dumpster behind a burger joint. Like burnt engine grease and the sharp crackle of a damaged hyperdrive. The sights? Too much neon, and too much rust, it was a wonder it didn’t just fall apart into a smear of debris across the stars the moment a ship touched down. The corridors were either underlit by the painfully unpleasant yellow fluoros or the epilepsy inducing strobe lights that announced the entrance to one of the facility’s many, many drinking holes, and both threatened to give her a headache. 

The floors were sticky, and she never could tell if it was spilled drinks or spilled blood. She never asked. 

She even hated the name. Port Nowhere. What a stupid, pretentious name. Criminals thinking they were funny, like pretending that their illicit activities were taking place in a magical neverwhere that existed beyond the bounds of law and civility somehow made it alright. Every time she had to say the name, she had to grit her teeth in frustration as her fingers tersely signed the words. 

Worst of all, though? The noise. The pounding music that echoed across the halls, different nightclubs competing to have the loudest beats; the rumble of illegal engine modifications spluttering from a dozen or more hangar bays. The thunderous crowds, and the sharp ricochet of blaster fire against the rusted steel plating. She could feel all of it, the unending vibrations, and even with her implants turned off, it was still horrendous to deal with- a weird buzzing drone that her brain just couldn’t process.

She had a headache, and she’d only been here five minutes. 

She stuffed her hands into her pockets and kept her head low, stalking from the shuttle bay and shouldering her way through the other passengers who were going far too slow for her liking. Port Nowhere had undergone a change of management in the last few years that made it slightly more accessible to the public- _slightly_. She might’ve even called it a tourist trap, if tourist traps regularly ran the risk of getting you mugged and stabbed. 

The main floor was taken up with a large circular cantina area, complete with dancing holographs and holographic dancers- and yes, she’d learned on previous visits that the owner considered them two different things. It was a busy night already, and the crowd streaming in behind her was only adding to the chaos and the noise; rubbing a hand against the side of her head and wishing her implants could negate the noise entirely and leave her in blessed silence, she weaved in and out of the patrons as she made her way up to the bar proper, keeping an eye out as she did. There were a number of staff serving, but the particular one she wanted... 

There. Leaning casually over the bar as he fixed a Zeltron’s hair, smiling charmingly as they giggled and pretended at being coy. She rolled her eyes and marched over, elbowing a large Kaleesh out of the way to get to the bar; the gangster snarled something at her, but she couldn’t read his lips beneath the bone plate mask on his face so she just stared coldly at him. He said something else, and she continued to stare, rather pointedly placing her hand on her belt where her blaster sat holstered. 

The alien sneered at her, before stomping away without any further retaliation. 

Satisfied, Thiare turned back around to the bar, looking for the Mirialan barkeep. He was still a few patrons down, still flirting outrageously with his Zeltron target, and Thiare watched as his nimble fingers carefully divested them of the golden, jewelled earrings they wore as he played with their hair. She couldn’t quite see them vanish, but she assumed they had to have vanished into his sleeve.

She let the scam continue for another moment or so, before thrusting her arm out and forcefully waving for attention, as if she wanted a drink. The Mirialian glanced almost dreamily in her direction, still in the midst of his routine- and froze as his gaze fell upon her. The cheerful, trustworthy charmer ground to a halt, and she could quite literally see him switching gears in his head as he decided how to deal with her. 

She waved again. 

The smile snapped back into place, all roguish charm, and he turned to whisper something to the Zeltron before sliding them a drink. This elicited another round of giggles, and they finally moved away from the bar, if somewhat reluctantly; the Mirialan, in turn, approached her with the same smile fixed firmly in place, his arms thrown wide in welcome. 

“Thiare,” Geralt said, his pale eyes glinting in the flashing neon of the place, “my dear-”

She put a hand up to stop him in his tracks. “You know I can’t hear you when the music is this loud,” she said, hands signing snappishly as she gave him a look that expressed how much of a simpleton she thought he was. 

His hands snapped around to the front instantly. “We both know you can read lips, sugar,” he said, speaking along as he signed back at her. As if to punctuate his point, he winked salaciously, and Thiare rolled her eyes. 

“It’s rude. And presumptuous.” 

“I was just saying hello! What part of that was rude?”

Bad start. She gritted her teeth. “Is Bobbi here?” she asked.

“What, don’t I get a hello back?”

She couldn’t be bothered with the effort required to snap his name, so she just sighed in exasperation and rubbed at her face. “If I say hello,” she said tersely, fingers stiff and jerky in their movements, “will you answer my questions?”

Geralt winked at her. “Well now, it’s always a possibility.”

Someone elbowed her in the back as they walked by, the bar far too crowded to allow ease of movement; it took everything in her not to spin about in a defensive stance, ready to disarm her attacker. But no further attack came, and she breathed out hard through her nose as she pressed her hands flat to the bar. 

Ew, bad idea. It was disgustingly sticky. 

Geralt was grinning knowingly when she looked back up at him, and he reached under the bar to produce a wet towelette. She scowled at him, but she took it anyway, scrubbing at her hands until she felt marginally less revolting. “You are way too jumpy for this line of work,” he said, eyes crinkled as he watched her. 

“Just because this establishment is designed to torture me doesn’t mean-”

“If you had to ask Bobbi some questions, why not just have Talia call in?” he said, a touch of something more like concern in his eyes. It was an obvious question, because it would make sense to ask renowned agent Vitalia Abelli to reach out to a woman who was practically an older sister to her, or at least to her charming scoundrel of a brother who tended the bars and provided entertainment to a good number of the patrons. But it came with the unwitting barb, the inevitable question- why would they bother to send her, when it was far more trouble than it was worth?

Why wouldn’t they send a good agent?

“Vitalia has work of her own,” she said curtly. “And her loyalties cannot always be trusted when it comes to Captain Voresh.” 

“I think you mean _Commodore_ Voresh,” he corrected with a roguish grin. “Our dear Voidhound has _many_ ships under her command, after all.”

“I didn’t come here to debate semantics. Can I speak to Bobbi or not?” 

Geralt leaned back from the bar slowly, miming a comical shrug. “You know as well as I do, that Bobbi don’t allow shop talk on Port Nowhere. This here is neutral ground-”

“You are in Alsakan air space and thereby bound by the laws and jurisdiction of Alsakan, and therefore by the laws and jurisdiction of the Galactic Republic. As an official representative of-”

He zipped forward and covered her hands with his, a look of mild alarm in his eyes. He pressed his lips into a thin line, no longer impishly amused by the situation. She just stared right back at him, and after a moment, he carefully let go of her hands, staying as close as he could with the hindrance of the bar between them. “Bobbi ain’t here,” he said curtly, his hand gestures careful and held close to the chest; it wasn’t subtle the way he glanced around the bar almost nervously. “But by all means, if you want to get yourself shanked, keep shouting that you’re...” He hesitated, grimacing as he obviously tried to get the point across without saying it.

“Working with Talia?” she said flatly. 

“Right,” he said. “Look, Bobbi is off somewhere, she got a call from Shan about a week ago about a job. All hush hush, I don’t know where she is. So, either have a drink and relax, or if you intend to keep scowling like that, maybe think about heading back to Coruscant before you blow your cover.” 

Thiare just stared at him, which in itself seemed to mean he was winning, because he’d already pointed out her scowling and if she kept doing it even though he was frustrating her...

She gave him a rude gesture instead. 

Geralt rolled his eyes. “Listen, sweetheart, I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got other customers,” he said, his gaze already drifting away from her towards where another patron was waving to get his attention. “Just send Vitalia with your questions, she’ll get it sorted.”

He didn’t give her a chance to respond, turning away to the next patron with the charming smile fixed firmly back in place, leaving her alone and frustrated and without even the benefit of a drink to fixate on. Okay, so she wasn’t so great in places like Port Nowhere- crowded and loud and boisterous and overwhelming-, but she was still good at her job, damn it. She had dismantled multiple Exchange cells over the last few years, and had even managed to bring down an Exchange sector chief several months ago. 

But that was because everybody underestimated the deaf girl- even the people on her side. Her SIS handlers always seemed vaguely surprised when she reported back with success, and her contacts seemed to want to treat her with kid gloves, just like Geralt had done now. And she’d logged a mission report a few days ago indicating that she was going to question Captain Voresh about Black Sun movement through her precious neutral space station, but no one had flagged her file for contact to let her know Agent Shan had already recruited Voresh for his mission?

That would involve anyone bothering to discipline the SIS Golden Child and give him the same treatment as the rest of the minions desperately trying to get funding for their operations, and they couldn’t have that, now, could they?

She wrinkled her nose in disgust. He might’ve done good work with that Revanite mess, but the rumours swirling about how chummy he’d gotten with the Imps during the mission didn’t exactly make her want to pin his picture to the inside of her locker- quite the opposite. There was no situation that ever made it worthwhile to work alongside Imps. 

Didn’t matter. Wasn’t her op, wasn’t her team- hell, she didn’t think Shan even knew her name. She’d passed him once in the hallway at headquarters, and he’d smiled and nodded in that absent way that colleagues do when they have no idea who you are. She’d just keep doing her job with a fraction of the resources and none of the trust of her superiors, like always. 

She scrubbed at her face with one hand as she straightened on the bar stool, trying to plot her next move. Just because Bobbi had a rule against work on the station didn’t mean that people weren’t getting up to no good, and there were plenty of bars and gaming halls and private rooms where illicit deals could be taking place. She’d already seen several prominent gang colours when she’d passed through, and just because Port Nowhere was declared neutral ground didn’t mean anything to these criminal scum. If anything, they’d just see it as an opportunity to have access to a safe port without the usual questions a registered Republic port would expose them to. 

She drummed her fingers on the bar, immediately regretting it when they came away sticky again; she wiped them on her pants as she turned slowly, surveying the room for a direction or anything that wanted to catch her interest. 

And paused. 

Geralt was still chatting away merrily to the patron who had caught his attention, and the tall, broad horn that tapered to a point a good foot above the other people gathered at the bar drew her gaze instantly. Her heart lurched into her throat, and she ducked her head back around immediately, eyes wide as she told herself not to be ridiculous. _There are millions of Krex in the galaxy_ , she scolded silently, _and plenty of them work for the Cartel. No reason for it to be him_.

Trying to be casual about it, she leaned back on her stool, feigning a stretch; as she did, she glanced to the side again, taking a better look at the Krex talking to Geralt. 

The saurian alien was huge, with beefy shoulders that took up the space of two patrons as he stood at the bar, and a huge bone horn protruding from his skull as a reminder that he could gut you as soon as look at you. His duster was worn, but had clearly been of good quality once upon a time, and his scales were of a greyish purple hue that seemed far brighter here under the neon than she knew them to be in the sunlight. Not that she’d personally seen him in the sunlight- only in the case files of the Strategic Information Service. 

Friendly Rin. Known associate and crewmember under one Captain Paxton Rall, one of the most dangerous and most wanted criminals on the Republic’s records. 

Her pulse was hammering a wild tattoo inside her veins as she tried to sit back at the bar as casually as possible, her mind racing. Rall wasn’t associated with any of the major crime syndicates, but his capture would be on par with the arrest of any criminal sector chief; stars, bringing in Paxton Rall was the sort of thing that would make her a legend in the SIS, a golden child just like Shan. Then nobody would look at her pityingly or talk down to her or handwave her previous successes, oh no- she would forever be the agent who took down the infamous Paxton Rall. 

She climbed down from the bar stool, stuffing her hands in her pockets and slouching away; she kept her head bowed, trying to look as seedy and suspicious as the rest of the assholes on this den of vice. When she was well and truly away from the bar- and out of sight of Geralt-, she lifted a hand to her ear, as if she meant to push back an errant lock of hair. Instead, she turned on her implants, wincing as she was bombarded instantly by the music and shouting and mechanical sounds of the vast station; it resolved into static a moment later when she set the scanner to roam, trying to patch into the staff comms channel. 

Once she was free of the main bar, she marched with more purpose, striding towards the public refreshers; she needed time to get into the comms system, time where she wouldn’t be watched by unfriendly eyes or carefully placed security cameras. She couldn’t guarantee that the refreshers would be entirely safe, but it was better than trying to slice into Port Nowhere’s security systems while standing in the middle of the main thoroughfare. 

There was one other person in the private room before the refreshers, a Neimoidian hunched over the sink with a distinctly ashen hue to their grey skin; they hissed miserably in her direction as she passed, but made no other threatening moves towards her. She let herself into a cubicle, checking the lock carefully, before setting down the lid and sitting on it. A quick scan of the cell concluded that there were no recording devices present, either officially installed by the staff or secretly by the seedier patrons, and she pulled her datapad out of her holster, along with a few cables and a battery pack. She smiled absently at the picture of her dog Lulu on the scuffed datapad cover, the beaming doggy grin setting some of the worst of her anxieties to rest. 

Nobody expected a spy to have scratched and dented equipment, but the public perception of her career was largely tainted by the gilded image of Imperial Intelligence. Sith Intelligence, they were supposed to call them now, didn’t make much of a difference- they had too much funding, too much political power, and in comparison most of the SIS had to make do with whatever they could scrounge off the end of the military budget. 

She’d heard that the top agents in the Empire got their own private ships, their own support crews- she couldn’t even imagine what that would be like. Just imagine, the results she could pull, if she had that sort of support, that sort of technology and budget. She was locked in a refresher with her own datapad, with a handful of wires trying to jerry rig a strong enough signal to get past Port Nowhere’s firewalls. 

She was used to this, though, and she worked quickly, pulling her hair back so that she could attach one of the cables to the tiny port in her implant behind her ear, wincing a little at the peculiar sensation it always provoked. The scanner in the implant had already locked onto the staff network, and with the boost from the datapad router she narrowed in on the signal, cleaning up the static until she could hear it clearly- or, at least, as clearly as she was able to hear anything. 

“-inbound flight from Duros to hangar three-krill, five minute call.”

“Any active weapon systems?” 

“Oh, you know, I completely forgot to do a fundamental part of my job and didn’t scan for- _of course I scanned for active weapons_.”

“Watch your fucking mouth, boyo, or I’ll put you on clean up crew.”

Apparently the lack of professionalism was a consistent part of Port Nowhere’s appeal, and she tuned the conversation out as she flicked through the flight manifests. The space station was as big as any official port, and there were over three dozen ships currently in berth, any number of which had clearly been registered under fake names and identification numbers. As the station crew continued to bicker and tease one another in her ears, she scanned the list with a little more care this time, looking for anything out of the ordinary. 

On her second pass over the list, she paused about two thirds of the way down. A Lethisk-class freighter was far too pricey for the average galactic scumbag to be travelling in, and the usual clientele for that sort of luxury vehicle definitely wouldn’t stop at a place like Port Nowhere. There were only a few sorts who could afford that sort of ship- like an infamous pirate captain with a penchant for riches, for example. 

She ran the registration number, and it came back invalid. 

She pulled the license, and found it attributed to one Captain Raxton Pall. 

The opposite of subtle. It was like he knew he had to pretend to be covert about his movements, but he was far too cocky to actually commit to it. It was like a challenge, a mockery, a spit in the face of Republic law. 

Good thing she was here to accept the challenge. 

She made a mental note of the hangar bay and disassembled her makeshift kit, stowing datapad and cables back into her satchel as she climbed to her feet; she flushed the refresher, just to complete the illusion, and made sure to stop at the sinks and wash her hands thoroughly. Although, to be honest, she probably needed that anyway. The sticky surface of the bar still lingered in her tactile memory, and she shuddered, adding more soap. 

The Neimoidian was still vomiting in the sink nearby, so she couldn’t activate her portable stealth field generator in the bathrooms, which was somewhat annoying. She’d have far better luck in here than out in the hallways, but she had to risk it.

Taking a deep breath, she marched calmly from the public rooms and towards the turbolift with purpose; nobody ever looked twice if you made it seem like you knew what you were doing, it was only when you stopped to loiter and scheme that people got suspicious. There were people gathered about in the thoroughfare, many with drinks in their hands, and despite the enforced neutrality of the space station, most of them had weapons strapped to their belts. She couldn’t afford to be suspicious. 

A pair of Nautolans got into the turbolift with her, and she smiled vaguely at them in a way that one does when forced to share a small space with strangers. She glanced upwards as discreetly as possible, looking for the inevitable globe of the security cam, and found the lens already scratched and dented. Hmm. Not surprising, really, but she wasn’t going to try anything foolish like fighting anyway. 

The Nautolans got out a floor above her own, chatting to themselves as they went; they both had the insignia for the White Maw on the back of their armour, and she gritted her teeth and stared at the wall until the door closed. Couldn’t go starting fights with every two-bit criminal she ran into, no matter how repulsive she personally found them- and especially not when there were bigger fish to catch. 

Thankfully, when the doors opened again on her floor, there was no one in sight; she tossed a probe cell into the corridor, hoping the clang of the small metal bead landing on the floor wouldn’t draw any attention. No bigger than a marble, it rolled to a stop near the far wall, and there were three quick pulses of light in rapid succession. The sensor in her implant gave her the all clear, and she activated her stealth generator before stepping out of the lift. She could feel rather than hear a buzzing in her ears that indicated voices in the near distance, and she paused quickly to collect the probe cell; the last thing she needed was anyone finding evidence of her lurking to fall into the wrong hands- and there were lots of wrong hands in this place. 

The stealth field held as she carefully made her way down the corridor, keeping to the shadows as best she could; honestly, she was surprised that they didn’t have anti-stealth measures in place, given the clientele of Port Nowhere. Or, maybe, that was the point of not having any security in place. Maybe Voresh was trying to pander to the crime lords, turn a blind eye to their activities. 

Was Vitalia covering up for Captain Voresh? Was Shan? There was a thought. Were the ranks of the SIS being corrupted by this den of iniquity, and they were letting quite literal acts of corruption slide for the sake of their friends? Maybe she needed to investigate more thoroughly, maybe-

There was movement out of the corner of her eye, and she froze instantly, holding her breath; she didn’t even dare to turn towards it, out of fear the motion might be enough to alert someone to her presence. A long, agonising second passed, and then another, and another, and she decided to risk looking. 

A large, grey-haired rat was perched atop a nearby fuel bin, sniffing the air curiously. 

She breathed out slowly, letting herself relax again. Nothing to worry about. She was just being jumpy. 

The hangar bay with her suspected prize was unguarded, with no obvious security measures in place to keep out intruders. She sidled up to the securilock on the wall, glancing around once more to make sure there were no bystanders; infiltration work would probably have been a lot easier if she had her implants active, but Port Nowhere just seemed... specifically designed to torture her particularly, when it came to audio input. It was easier to concentrate without that particular distraction, and she’d just have to be on her toes to compensate.

Her scrambler key pinged after less than a minute, and the hangar bay door hissed open; she tucked her tools back into her satchel and crept inside, eyeing the Lethisk as she moved forward. It screamed wealth, and not in a glamourous sort of way- it was sleek and jet-black, and wouldn’t have looked terribly out of place amongst the luxury yachts of Alderaan were it not for the garish patterns painted all over it. She squinted, trying to make out the details, but from here it just looked like a film of oil over water, a rainbow without any sort of substance. 

It was probably fitting- a black heart covered by a thin veneer of extravagance. Too much wealth, no substance or style. 

In other words, a pirate. 

She circled the ship once, taking a thorough assessment of the vessel. Identifying marks, notable modifications- she took pictures and notes, scribbling furiously with her stylus while checking that the hangar bay door behind her remained closed. She could still feel plenty of noise through her feet, so she wasn’t going to get much of a heads up if someone tried to sneak up on her; she just had to hope her stealth generator held up, and that she was in and out quickly enough to avoid detection. 

It was a nice ship, she had to admit, despite the garish paint job; the Lethisk was an excellent craft, and it didn’t deserve the reputation it had garnered of being associated with less desirable clientele. Perhaps in another setting, without the ugly yellow fluorescent lights of the hangar bay glaring down on them, this particular model might have looked more impressive. As it was, it only looked like an oil smeared mess.

At the end of her second circuit around the ship, she paused, looking up at the entry ramp. Her investigations so far hadn’t roused anyone, and honestly, the entire crew were probably all down on one of the public levels, enjoying the many lascivious and violent thrills that Port Nowhere had on offer. If she went up the ramp to the airlock to see what sort of security programs they had in place, it wasn’t like she was putting herself in terrible danger, right? She still had the stealth generator on, she was still currently invisible to the naked eye. Depending on the tech they had installed on the door, she might be able to slice right into the main computer, give herself a back door entrance for later when it was less suspicious. 

She could plant a tracker. 

She glanced over her shoulder one last time, but the hangar bay was still and empty. Sidling up the ramp as carefully as she could, placing her boots with care so that they didn’t clang on the metal, she eased her way up to the airlock. The keypad beside the door was fancy, as befitting a luxury ship like this, but nothing that she couldn’t deal with given enough time. She had a dataspike in her satchel, and she reached in to draw it out as she scanned the device with her other hand.

She felt the crackle in the air around her to signify her stealth field failing at the same moment that something hard pressed into the back of her head. Something that felt uncomfortably like a blaster nozzle. 

She closed her eyes. _Fuck_.

Her implant was still tuned to the staff comms, which she’d only half been paying attention to, just to make sure there were no red alerts about intruders in the hangar bays. She couldn’t reach up now and change it to environmental input, because whoever was behind her would shoot her as soon as her hand moved towards her head. 

Double fuck. 

The blaster jabbed her hard, a very pointed poke, and she had to assume that whoever was holding it had snarled instructions at her, instructions that she very much couldn’t hear right now. Hoping for the best, she made a show of slowly putting her arms out at her sides, moving them away from the gun at her own hip. They jabbed her again, and she gritted her teeth, holding off on hissing at them only by the barest margin. It was possible they were being very polite with their instructions, and her lack of response was making them jumpy. 

But she didn’t want to just blurt out _‘hey, I’m mostly deaf, sorry’_ to a- presumably- pirate, because it wasn’t any of their damn business, and she didn’t want to give them anything that could be used over her. Nothing to use as leverage, nothing that could help to ID her, nothing. Far harder to track down a random human slicer than it was to look for a deaf human slicer- that narrowed the field significantly, and she didn’t want to give them that edge. 

Had to take a risk. 

She opened her eyes and took a deep breath. “Can you turn me around?” she asked, hoping she hadn’t just cut them off mid sentence. It was an odd request, sure, but it did two things- one, it gave the power to her assailant, let them stay in control of the situation by choosing to turn her around, which made them considerably less jumpy on the trigger. And two, if they turned her around, assuming they weren’t an alien species with no observable mouth like a Gand or a Kel Dor, she would probably be able to get by on lip-reading without having to admit that she was deaf. 

She stared at the sleek black metal wall of the Lethisk, waiting for the request to either see her pushed around, or shot in the back of the head. Her heart was in her throat, and she wanted to vomit it up. Wasn’t the first time she’d found herself in a life or death situation, but it never got easier. 

A hand landed roughly on her shoulder, and she fought back a panicked squeak, biting her lip as she was dragged around and pushed back up against the door. The blaster was still aimed right at her face, and the hand stayed on her shoulder, apparently to pin her in place; the impact knocked the wind from her slightly, a grunt escaping from her lips as she looked past the blaster in her face to the person holding it- and her.

She felt her blood freeze. 

The sleek black armour matched the ship almost perfectly- it was clearly expensive, and there was evidence of elegant embroidery still clinging in places, but it was also worn and scratched and had various embellishments that were just as gaudy as the oily rainbow paint job on the Lethisk. The hand holding the blaster ended in clawed metal fingers, and the skeletal metal frame of a cybernetic arm vanished beneath the broad shoulders of the coat. 

Purple skin beneath a sharply angled and painfully distinct helmet, and heavily tattooed lekku hanging down to his waist. Unmistakeable, even if the pictures in the SIS files could never even dare to do justice to how powerful an image it was in person. 

She hadn’t been caught by one of the assorted pirates milling about in the crew. She’d been caught by Rall himself. 

Her eyes darted to his belt, and just as the stories said, there were at least three lightsabers attached there; one was distinctly ostentatious enough that it had to belong to a Sith, and the other two... could’ve been Jedi in origin? Maybe? She’d never met a Jedi before, so she had no idea what was normal for a lightsaber hilt, but... stars. Even just stealing a lightsaber had to be no mean feat, but the rumours were that he’d killed for them. He’d killed Jedi. He’d killed a _Sith_. She was just a regular person. 

She was going to die. 

And of course he was wearing a fucking helmet that covered most of face, giving her no chance to read his lips and hide her disability. She could see his chin moving, but she could only see a tiny sliver of his mouth and the black tattoo that intersected his lower lip threw her off, and he was gesturing with his hands as he talked, but... fuck. It was no good. 

“I can’t understand you,” she blurted out, hoping she hadn’t interrupted a monologue that had started with _‘don’t interrupt me’_. Rall’s hands paused mid gesticulation, his head slightly cocked to the side, and she could feel the curious confusion bleeding off of him. She was speaking Basic, which presumably he was as well, and her accent was mild enough that most people didn’t even consider that it might be a result of her deafness. She swallowed nervously when he didn’t continue, and tried again. “Can you take your helmet off?” 

He responded immediately, the gesticulations fierce and wide, and she tried not to cringe against the door. “I can’t- I need to see your mouth,” she said desperately, hating how frightened she sounded. She’d stood up to Exchange gangsters without blinking, but that was another world entirely to dealing with a man who had killed demigods. 

He stopped again, and she could see his eyes burning into her from the narrow slits in the visor. Stars, maybe he was Force-sensitive. Maybe he could read her thoughts. Oh, that wasn’t good, then he’d know she was SIS, and then he’d-

He reached up and took hold of the helmet in both hands, pulling it up and free of his lekku; he shook his head as he did so, the long purple appendages flicking gracefully as he tucked the helmet under one arm and kept the blaster in his other hand trained on her. 

Thiare stared. 

She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but she wasn’t expecting her first thought to be _‘fuck he’s good looking’_. And she hated it, she hated that the first thought going through her head when facing one of the most wanted criminals in the galaxy, a murderer who currently had her at gunpoint, was about how attractive she found him. She was trying to be taken more seriously in the agency, and that? That was unacceptable. She would be laughed out of headquarters and into obscurity. 

But he _was_ good looking. She couldn’t get around that fact. The purple of his skin was rich and deep, and the swirling patterns on his lekku were like works of art; he was younger than she’d been expecting, but she wasn’t really a great judge of age in twi’leks anyway. Pirate captains were supposed to be old and wizened and greedy as a Hutt at a buffet, but he was... well, he was probably middle-aged, but he definitely wasn’t old. The orange of his irises stood out like a burnt sunset, his eyes framed by the same black that intersected his lip. There were scars there, evidence of a life hard lived, small slashes of pink against the darker purple.

And then he smirked, his grin widening across his face in a manner that suggested he knew exactly the direction her thoughts had fled towards, and was delighted by it. Thiare felt her cheeks heat, but she couldn’t look away now.

He gestured with the blaster hand, pointing vaguely in the direction of her head. His lips moved, and this time she was able to at least pick out the obvious question.

“Yes, I’m deaf,” she said, not breaking eye contact. 

He raised his eyebrows as if amused, and she scowled. That only seemed to amuse him further, because his grin was so broad that it looked ready to crack his cheeks. There was too much filler in his manner of speaking, but she could make a good enough guess that his next question was along the lines of _‘what are you doing to my ship?’_.

She raised her chin defiantly. “I was trying to stowaway,” she lied.

His lips moved. _Is that so?_

Thiare nodded. “I lost my money at the gaming tables. Couldn’t afford a ticket off this junk bucket. I just wanted to get on a ship-”

He interrupted her, gesturing a little more forcefully with the blaster this time. It was harder to follow his words as his body language grew more aggressive, but it looked like _‘do you really expect me to believe that?’_. There might have been a few expletives thrown in for good measure, and she couldn’t say she exactly blamed him.

“Please, I’m really sorry-”

“Who are you?” 

That question was easy enough to understand. What wasn’t so easy was the answer. She needed to give a fake name, she was trained to give a fake name, but she hesitated for a second too long and his expression grew dark. “Thiare,” she said, kicking herself almost immediately, “my name is Thiare.”

“A pretty name for a pretty liar-”

“It’s not a lie! It’s my name!” 

His lip curled in a snarl, all traces of amusement gone, and he stepped closer, pressing the blaster hard against her temple as he did so. This close, she could see the slightly sharper teeth that some of his species had, and she could feel the heat of his breath on her face. “And tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you dead for disrespecting me?” he said, or close enough to it that she could fill in the gaps. 

What he shouldn’t have done was step so close to her. She flicked her wrist, and the wrist brace hidden under the cuff of her jacket responded to the gesture, depositing a small, metal ball into her palm. She squeezed it, activating the device, and the magnet flew out of her hand and into the frame of his cybernetic arm, attaching itself to one of the long struts that ran from shoulder to elbow. He must’ve felt it- or perhaps heard it, she didn’t know if it made much of a noise when it impacted- because he started to look down.

But not fast enough. 

The miniaturised electromagnetic pulse bomb went off, and a surge of electricity overpowered him; it wasn’t strong enough to kill him, not by far, but the charge _was_ enough to disable his implants, and he staggered backwards as his cybernetic arm was consumed with electrical output, sparking and snapping as he dropped the blaster. 

Thiare dove to the side instantly, intending to kick the blaster out of reach, but realising too late that it’d fallen the wrong way for her to really get to it easily. For an agonising second as she scrambled out of his range, she debated whether to lunge back for the blaster, but decided it was better to get her distance while she could. She got her feet under her and sprinted for the hangar bay door, counting the precious seconds until the EMP would run out of charge. 

A searing pain stabbed into her calf, and she tumbled to the ground; she could smell the burning fabric already, and she knew before she even hit the hard durasteel floor that she’d been shot. She skidded a foot or two as she crashed, and she did her best to ignore the pain as she rolled onto her back, hand fumbling for her own blaster. 

Paxton was staggering towards her, his cybernetic arm hanging limp and useless at his side; there were faint lines of steam rising from his shoulder, and the occasional spark stuttering out from between the charred wires and dripping onto the floor like blood. He was quite clearly in a lot of pain as well, his gait uneven as he stalked towards her, and she tried frantically to crabwalk backwards out of his reach even as she brought her own gun up. 

He paused, and the two of them were frozen in place, staring at one another with their blasters held at the ready. The pain in her calf began to bloom ferociously as the burn from the laser bolt set in, and she felt her eyes watering with tears that she tried desperately to blink away. 

_Shoot him_ , she screamed at herself. _Shoot first!_

Her pocket began to buzz, the onset of a holocall; at the same time, an overhead light began flashing in the hangar bay, the ominous red light making Paxton’s eyes blood red. She didn’t drop her gaze for a second, ignoring the call, but she saw hesitation on his face, and he cocked his head to the side as if listening to something. 

It was only then that she realised the general babble of the staff in her implants was gone, replaced by a single voice that she struggled to focus on. She didn’t know whether she’d caught a little bit of the discharge from the EMP or not, enough to frazzle her implants, or whether she just couldn’t process sound while her heartbeat was thumping so loudly in her ears, but she gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate. 

“-the entirety of Ziost,” the voice was saying, in a coldly clinical manner. “There are no survivors, I repeat, there are no survivors.”

She recognised that voice. It was Captain Voresh. 

“Lock down Port Nowhere immediately, and prepare all long range scanners. Make sure evacuation protocols are in place for any- and I mean any- threats you might encounter, you hear me?” 

_What?_

Paxton started backing up towards the ramp of his ship, his arms spread wide as if in apology. He shouted something, she could see his mouth moving, but from this distance she didn’t stand a chance of working out what he was saying. Not when she was in pain, and struggling to translate one voice already. 

“We have no way of knowing where Emperor Shit-Idiot is going to strike next,” Captain Voresh continued in her ear. “He just ate several billion people without even blinking, he could be going anywhere.” 

Paxton turned and jogged over to his ship, vanishing from sight, and for some reason she didn’t try to stop him. Instead, she pulled out her buzzing commlink, and saw the emergency alerts pouring in from the agency and the military, alerts that kept coming even after she’d cleared the first few. 

Ziost, the bureaucratic capital of the Sith Empire, was... _gone_. Devoured by the very emperor the people had served so faithfully for millennia. _Gone_. She hated Imperials with every fibre of her being, but for the first time in her life... she felt horrified at the enormity of their deaths. She felt sorry for the Imperials of Ziost, and that upended her entire world. 

The red light- which she now realised had to be an emergency lantern, activated when the station had gone into lockdown- continued to flash above her, and as she watched, the engines of the Lethisk powered up; Rall was abandoning his crew just to get out before the lockdown trapped his ship. 

What an asshole. 

Thiare dragged herself to her feet, letting out an ugly cry when she tried to put weight on her injured leg; it wouldn’t carry her, but she did her best to hobble a half dozen feet so that she was closer to the ship, fumbling in her satchel as she did so. 

The Lethisk lifted off from the deck, and the backwash from the engines nearly knocked her from her feet. 

She staggered forward a few more feet, and as the ship turned to exit, she hurled the tracking beacon with all of her strength, praying she’d aimed true. 

The device clattered against the hull, almost bouncing right off again- and then the magnets engaged, and it clamped down hard. 

The ship surged from the hangar bay, and jumped to hyperspace almost instantly. 

Thiare sagged onto her knees, and then fell flat on her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is canon compliant with the Empire's Ransom series, so for the uninitiated, Captain Bobbi Voresh is THE Smuggler (owned by the delightful magesmagesmages/Miri) and Geralt Abelli is one of her many crew (owned by the equally delightful angelicfangirl). Vitalia Abelli is likewise owned by angelicfangirl. The recent Revanite crisis was dealt with by Theron, Lana, my agent Thessa and her insufferable tag-along Thake.
> 
> And for those wondering, Thiare is pronounced 'tee-ahr-ay' as if you were literally saying the letters T R A out loud. She is not completely deaf- she lost her hearing as a child, and her cochlear implants are boosted by the wonders of Star Wars' vague medical science, but it's difficult enough for her sometimes that she prefers not to use her implants


	2. Fallout

“ _Fuck!_ ”

Bloodhound frowned, pausing in her dubious ministrations. “Language,” she said firmly.

Paxton balled his free hand up into a fist, smacking it against his thigh as a mean of coping with the pain. “It fucking hurts,” he said, but she just cuffed him over the back of the lekku.

“If you stopped squirming, I’d be done a lot faster, and it’d hurt far less.”

He whined petulantly, kicking his feet against the bed frame. “You’d understand if you had a disability like mine,” he started to say, voice thick with dramatic misery, but she was having none of it.

She snapped the casing back onto the shoulder port far too hard, cutting him off mid word as he grunted in pain instead. “Your disability made you go and fight a spy, did it?” she said, her accent growing heavier as she scolded. “Your disability made it impossible for you to stop your dick from doing the thinking for two minutes, ah?”

His head fell back against the wall at his back. “You’re so mean to me, Bella.”

“And I can be a whole lot meaner if you call me that again,” she said. She clicked his arm back into the socket, tightening the locking restraints until she seemed satisfied. She stood back and surveyed him critically while he flexed his hand into a fist repeatedly, twisting the wrist around to make sure he had full movement back. “That’s the best I can do on short notice- I never trained for anything more thorough than minor repairs.”

He pouted as he kept wiggling his fingers. “It ain’t movin’ right,” he said, and got a punch in the other arm for his troubles.

“Then call a fucking doctor, what do I look like?” She crossed her arms and scowled at him. “And not a fucking thank you for my troubles either-”

“All you’ve done is yell at me in my hour of direst need-”

“Ay, you want me to go put your arm back in the fucking box again?”

Paxton scowled back at her, but after a moment he dropped his gaze. “Thought you were the one scolding me for my language,” he muttered.

Bloodhound scoffed, though the sound was not entirely unkind. “Maybe I need to remember to use a language you can actually speak,” she said pointedly. “And since you only know the language of fuck- how to fuck someone, and how to fuck someone over-”

“Thank you Bella,” he said loudly, interrupting her before she could get too far into her diatribe.

She still had her arms folded, but her expression softened slightly- not so annoyed, more of a smirk on her lips. “You’re welcome, dear captain,” she said.

He climbed down off of the bed, still flexing his hand open and shut as he went; there was a definite resistance in the mechanism, and he was already getting a mild headache from trying too hard to concentrate on the connection. “What’s our status?” he asked, grunted at the small zap of electricity he could feel in the ruined shoulder socket.

Bloodhound fell into a more serious pose, adopting the role of the ship’s second-in-command instead of that of frustrated best friend. “There are some grumbles amongst the crew, to be expected after you abandoned us all for two days.”

He tried to lift his arms imploringly, to insist that he would never dream of abandoning her, but his cybernetic arm stopped at a certain angle and would not move an inch higher; he could feel the immediate build up of heat in the socket, and the telltale vibration of the battery furiously overextending itself. “I simply wanted my crew to experience all the benefits of an extended shore leave, with the exquisite facilities of Port Nowhere on offer for their enjoyment,” he said graciously.

She snorted. “Lucky for you, we weren’t docked at some backwater smuggling port, or you would’ve had a mutiny on your hands.” Her expression grew serious again. “But you’d best give them something to let out their frustrations, or we’ll find ourselves in trouble sooner than later.”

He winced as he rubbed at his shoulder. “You got something in mind, I take it?”

“A few options, yes.”

“My trusty Bloodhound, always sniffing out the most tantalizing and splendiferous treats for us all.”

She gestured to the door with a nod of the head, and he followed her out of the medbay and into the hallway. “Friendly Rin is keeping an eye on crew morale for now,” she said as they walked towards the bridge. The sound of some upbeat rock music was playing from the crew area, and the whoops and cheers of what seemed to indicate an impromptu shockboxing tournament echoed down from the cargo hold. “He always seems to maintain a hold on the moods of everyone far better than I do.”

“That’s because you terrify them, Bella.”

She cuffed him over the back of the head again. “And I told you not to call me that again in public,” she said irritably.

He adjusted his helmet after the knock sent it awry, winking salaciously at her as he did so. “A six foot five lesbian who could bench press a dewback without breaking a sweat? If I weren’t in love with you, my darling, I’d be terrified of you as well.”

“Oh, you should still be terrified of me. I clearly need to work harder.”

The bridge doors hissed open ahead of them, and a familiar Rodian swaggered out while a funky b’ssa nuuvu tune served as her exit music, her thumbs hooked into her belt like she was walking out of the sleaziest cantina in Bilbousa. “Captain,” she drawled in Huttese, flicking an insolent salute with two fingers as she passed. One half of a pair of identical Rodian twins, both of them went by Mauler simply because ‘ _it amused them_ ’. Mauler the Brother was far more sedate and reserved than Mauler the Sister- she, at least, had well and truly earned the name.

“My dear Mauler, you are looking as magnificent as an Elerion sunset,” he said, spinning in time with her as if he meant to follow her instead.

“I should hope so,” she called over her shoulder. “I got my scales polished at the boutique on Port Nowhere.”

“And you look divine, my darling-”

“I charged it to your account.” She didn’t break her stride, and kept walking around the corridor out of sight.

Paxton watched her go, and when he looked back to Bloodhound, she had an unmistakable ‘ _I told you so_ ’ look on her face. He held his arms wide. “She looks good,” he said.

Bloodhound just tilted her head to the side. “You’re lucky I didn’t let them clean you out altogether,” she said, gesturing back to the cockpit, where the music continued to play. It was less like walking onto the bridge of a starship, and more like finding yourself in a underground samba den with a convenient starscape view- there were empty drinks left about, and there were posters tacked to empty sections of the walls. There was a bobble-headed wampa doll glued to the navigator’s console, wobbling ever so slightly with the vibrations of the ship.

In the navigator’s chair sat a Nautolan- or perhaps sprawled was the correct descriptor, given that she was sitting sideways in the seat with her legs hanging over the arm, a trashy gossip magazine loaded onto her datapad as she hummed along with the music and conducted with her feet. Of the fourteen head-tresses that all Nautolans bore on their heads, thirteen of hers were significantly shorter than normal, scarred and wilted from an old injury decades earlier that had nearly claimed her life.

She glanced back over her shoulder as they entered, and Paxton threw his arms wide as if expecting a hug. “Promise you ain’t mad, Jehni?” he teased, hoping she would take the bait.

“Mad Jehni?” She vaulted out of the chair, a broad grin on her face as she came around and threw herself into his arms. “I sure as hell ain’t Grim Jehni!”

He laughed, clapping her on the back with his good arm, and took a step back to survey both her and the bridge- she’d actually done a fairly good job of tidying up his mess in the few hours they’d been back on board. “It’s nice to see that someone around here still appreciates me,” he said, coming around to the captain’s chair and sinking gratefully down into it.

Mad Jehni snorted delightedly. “Takes more than a few days absence to make my heart grow... less fonder? No wait, absence makes the heart grow fonder, so I guess being in your company is what’s supposed to make me less fond- wait, I have multiple hearts, that phrase doesn’t work at all for me-”

“Mad as always, I see,” he said, stopping her in her tracks before she could go off on a wild tangent- there’d be no stopping her for hours if they let her get going. Some said it was the brain damage from the loss of her tresses, some said she was just daft to start with; regardless, she was a delight, but one needed a certain amount of stamina to deal with her enthusiastic... enthusiasm.

“Just like the name says,” she said cheerfully. She winced comically. “Oh, but um, maybe don’t go down to engineering anytime soon? Xuan is real mad.”

Paxton grunted as he flexed his mechanical hand, feeling the click and strain as it continued to resist him. “That Faleen bastard is always in a foul mood,” he said. “Would’ve thought a few days shore leave in a nice port’d do him good.”

“Shore leave implies it was an agreed upon arrangement,” Bloodhound said, coming to stand beside his chair in her capacity as second in command, “whereas you-”

“Left you all weeping and rending your clothing in agony at my absence, yes yes.” His thumb locked in place, and nothing he did could make it move. “Goddess’ saggy tits.”

“Did you have some place in mind, boss?” Mad Jehni said, clambering back over the top of her chair like some kind of demented aquatic spider. She was still bobbing in place to the music as she punched up the controls, priming the engines for a jump. “We’re fully fuelled and ready to go.”

He grimaced as he glanced up at Bloodhound. “Anything on your radar over in Hutt Space?” he said reluctantly.

Her expression gave nothing away, but he could feel the smugness oozing off of her. “Hutt Space is big, captain,” she said mildly. “Was there somewhere in particular you were hoping-”

“Nar Shaddaa, fuck it all. I need to go to Elsie’s and get my arm fixed. Might as well try and break even on the trip since it’ll cost me a fucking arm and a leg to get fixed up.”

She smiled, ever so slightly. “As it so happens,” she said, “I have a couple of jobs lined up on Nar Shaddaa and Nal Hutta.”

Paxton gave her a sour look. “Just luck of the draw, I’m sure,” he said sarcastically.

“Mm.” The smile didn’t move, but he felt like he was drowning in her smugness. “You should probably make some calls before we jump, make sure they’re expecting you.”

“Yeah, yeah, smartass,” he grumbled. He looked over at Mad Jehni as he leaned over to activate the holocomm in the console. “Prep for jump to Nar Shaddaa, my love.”

She saluted. “Aye aye, boss.”

He sighed, gritting his teeth as he plugged in the appropriate digits for his intended recipient. The holocomm took a few long seconds to connect across the vast distances of space, and then after a moment of static, a striking twi’lek woman in a doctor’s coat and an alarmingly short skirt appeared before them.

Paxton put a hand over his heart, tilting his head like a lovestruck suitor. “My dear Doctor Torr,” he began.

Doctor Kol’aya Torr shook her head. “Nope,” she said, and disconnected.

He’d been expecting that. Frankly, he probably deserved it. “Not a word,” he said, lifting a finger as if to interrupt Bloodhound as he redialled.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said innocently.

“I can _feel_ it,” he said, and as the call reconnected he smiled broadly at the sour-faced woman before him, adopting a wounded posture. “Before you cruelly interrupt me again,” he said, but she cut him off immediately.

“Was the one syllable too complicated for you?” she said, arms crossed aggressively.

“My dear doctor-”

“Not helping.”

“I can pay whatever you ask!”

She cocked her head to that side. “That’s helping,” she said, although there was no warmth in her tone. “What did you do?”

He did his best to look innocent. “ A minor misunderstanding, I assure you-”

“He got into a fight with a woman and she destroyed his arm,” Bloodhound said calmly. Doctor Torr looked up over his shoulder at her, and he resisted the urge to pout. “I can send you my preliminary scans if you would like.”

“That would help, thank you,” Doctor Torr said, a modicum of interest coming into her expression. “A single woman got the best of him? I’d like to buy her a drink.”

Paxton did pout at that.

“I believe I still owe _you_ a drink,” Bloodhound said, and he slowly turned incredulously to stare up at her. She didn’t look at him, but she was smiling at the good doctor. “If you’re still amenable to it, of course.”

“A happy compromise,” Doctor Torr said, and he looked back and forth between the two women waiting for one of them to reveal it was all a jest at his expense. Neither of them did. “How far out are you?”

Mad Jehni cleared her throat. “Five days, seventeen hours and thirty-four minutes,” she said, and after a moment’s hesitation, added “I mean, if we leave in the next three and a half minutes, I don’t know how long Bloodhound’s file will take to transfer-”

“I’ve already sent it,” Bloodhound said, putting her datapad back in the holster on her hip.

Doctor Torr nodded. “I’ll make sure I’ve got some time clear next week, then,” she said. “And I’ll have the bill ready for you.”

“We’ll see you then,” Bloodhound said with a nod.

“Looking forward to it, Bella.”

The moment the call disconnected, Paxton was on his feet, pointing almost accusingly at Bloodhound with his mouth hanging agape. “You,” he said, almost unable to form the rest of the sentence, “you!”

Bloodhound simply crossed her arms and looked at him wryly. “Something on your mind, captain?”

“You seduced my doctor!”

She shrugged. “You were unconscious for several days when you got the arm fitted the first time,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“And you didn’t even get me a _discount?_ ”

“How do you know I didn’t?”

There was a knock at the door, and they turned to find Mauler back again. “So sorry to interrupt,” she drawled, clearly sounding anything but sorry, “but I’ve got some news for you.” She held a small box in her hands, and she tossed it over towards him; there was no way he was going to manage catching it with his wrecked arm, which she absolutely had to know and was clearly trying to make him fumble for it. Thankfully, Bloodhound took pity on him, snatching it out of the air with a pointed look in Mauler’s direction as she handed it to him.

He knew better than to contribute to whatever pissing match his lady lieutenants had going on, so he simply beamed magnanimously in Mauler’s direction, offering her a sweeping bow. “A gift, my dear?” he said grandly as he opened the box. “You really shouldn’t have.”

“It’s not a gift, and I wouldn’t have.”

Inside the box was a small metal contraption, vaguely spherical, and with what was very clearly a transmitter aerial poking out of the top. He picked it up delicately between two fingers, holding it leerily as if it was about to bite him. “Ah,” he said. “Just what I always wanted.”

Mauler’s head spines straightened and then relaxed again, the Rodian equivalent of rolling one’s eyes. “Fuck you.”

“Is it a pet? Do I have to name it?”

“It’s a fucking tracking device, you dumb shit,” she hissed, her snout puckering with disdain. “The idiot act ain’t so funny right now.”

“You Rodians are so quick to violence,” he said, tsking at her in disappointment. He turned the tracking device over in his hand, as if that could give him the insight he needed. When he didn’t ask immediately, Mauler crossed her arms pointedly and began to tap her foot irritably on the floor. Eventually he sighed dramatically, slowly looking up at her. “I suspect you have something you wish to tell me, my dear.”

Mauler snorted roughly. “That particular tech there?” she said, gesturing to the device in his hand. “That’s Republic. Specifically their weak ass excuse for intelligence.”

“Ain’t nothing about the Republic that’s intelligent, that’s for sure,” Bloodhound muttered.

“Boss?” Mad Jehni was leaning back in her chair, her finger poised over the hyperdrive as she stared up at him with her unreadable black eyes. “We good for jump?”

Paxton turned the innocuous little piece of tech over in his fingers, studying it with far more interest now. He’d figured it for a tracking device, that much was fairly obvious; he knew the little spitfire hadn’t been looking to stowaway onboard for a free trip, and to be honest he’d assumed she was just a shitty bounty hunter or a pissed off mark, looking to square things up from a take. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d screwed someone over only to see them come back with red in their eyes looking for revenge, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Republic, though? That was new. Especially on Port Nowhere. It wasn’t exactly a secret that Bobbi Voresh was on the payroll of the Republic, but she was good enough to insist on neutrality in her home port.

Were the SIS using Port Nowhere with her knowledge? He had to say, the thought of dear Commodore Voresh tipping her hand against the underworld folk that had taken her so enthusiastically into their bosoms left a sour taste in his mouth. If there was one thing he took seriously, it was betrayal.

Well, that and slavery. He was a pirate, but he had standards, damn it.

His gut told him the little spitfire- _Thiare_ , she’d stammered, _tee arr aay_ in a thickly accented voice that lingered in his thoughts- wasn’t working with the approval of Port Nowhere, but he couldn’t take any chances. He hadn’t gotten to where he was today without taking unnecessary ris- alright, that was a blatant lie, he’d taken all manner of risks throughout the years, because without risk there was no chance for glory and gold. If he never took risks, he’d still be back where this had all started, on a shitty slave labour construction site back in Sith space, staring at the exposed skull of the asshole Sith overseer who had made the mistake of turning his back on him.

“Boss?”

Paxton made a decision.

“A slight deviation in our plans, Jehni my love,” he said, turning away from Mauler and Bloodhound and moving to take his seat in the captain’s chair once more. He kept the tracking device in his hand, tossing it up into the air and catching it again with ease. “Find me the closest cargo port- I find myself rather desperately wanting to ship something to Coruscant.”

* * *

Thiare stared moodily at the projection screen, tapping her stylus irritably against the side of her datapad. The agent sitting beside her kept shooting her dirty looks, but she ignored him. She had been stuck in this lecture hall for going on three hours now, and her butt was aching from sitting in the crappy plastic seat without a break.

Not a single one of the speakers had used a protocol droid to offer Basic Sign Language, which was a direct violation of the human resources disability protocols, nor had any of them offered a delayed transcript. The acoustics in the hall were awful, and while she could mostly get by when the speakers were human, that wasn’t always the case, and if they were non-human? She didn’t stand a chance; case in point, the current analyst addressing the assembly of agents was an Ithorian, and she couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying. Mouths on the side of the head, out of direct sight for her attempts at lip-reading, with vastly different dialect pronunciation structure to humans and a muffled vocalisation pattern that her implants could only translate as buzzing nonsense when she was in close conversation with one. At the other end of a lecture hall, it was utterly pointless.

She was trying to follow along with the slides on the screen for reference, but there was clearly some context she was missing. A huge number of active field agents had been called home to Coruscant following the Sith Emperor’s attack on Ziost, and while she appreciated the infodump on the state of affairs in the Empire, she really appreciated it more when they bothered to make it accessible for her. Three hours of being trapped in a mandatory lecture that she couldn’t even understand was beginning to verge on pure torture.

The slides were something about... Sith recruitment numbers? Maybe? There was an empty column for Ziost, and then an overflowing one for Dromund Kaas and another one for Korriban, and then progressively through the major hubs in Imperial space, but it could just have easily have been military recruitment numbers. It could’ve been how many goddamn Imps were tuning into the season finale of _Force-Bonded at First Sight_ , for all she knew, because it was a fucking poorly labelled graph and she couldn’t understand anything the Ithorian with the laser pointer was saying, so what was even the point of her being here?

If she hadn’t been threatened with another reprimand on top of the one she’d already earned for her botched encounter on Port Nowhere, she might’ve walked out.

Thankfully, the Ithorian analyst seemed to be wrapping up, and Director Trant’s personal assistant moved to the front of the room again, her suit still as crisp and uncreased as it had been three hours ago when the presentations had started. Thiare felt like she’d been stuck in this hall for at least three weeks, and she’d been shifting and fidgeting so much in the last hour that her pants probably looked like a concertina fold. The underarms of her shirt felt gross, and she desperately wanted to get up and stretch and take a bathroom break.

She felt a brief pang of resentment at how composed Director Trant’s assistant looked as she stood before hundreds of agents and analysts and op directors, a datapad tucked in close to her body in one arm and the other hand still holding a stylus as if she’d been meticulously taking notes. “We will be using this data to determine upcoming reassignments and projects,” she said, or close enough to it that Thiare was confident enough that she could roll her eyes. “Our focus going forward following the events of Ziost is obviously going to be working to keep the Empire at a disadvantage, so expect to see a lot of current ops put on hold in favour of this objective.”

Like they were going to put her on Imp duty. She was far too hostile towards Imperials to work effectively undercover in the Empire, she’d proved that on a number of occasions. It was why she worked so well on the anti-piracy task force, no one cared if she got too aggressive with pirates and slavers.

The session finally wrapped up a few minutes later, and Thiare levered herself out of the chair with a groan, rubbing at her lower back. The agent beside her cast her one final dirty look, to which she stared back without flinching; they rolled their eyes and heaved their satchel up onto their shoulder, turning their back on her without further interaction. Thiare looked down at her own datapad and the scrawled collection of illegible notes she’d made, her own frustration bleeding through with every pen stroke. She sighed, pulling up the Heorem Complex’s internal messaging system and sending off a terse request for a copy of the slides and a transcript of the speakers. If they were going to waste her time by pulling her away from her cases, she was at least going to insist on getting the information they’d interrupted her for.

There was a crowd trying to push through the doors and into the hallways, so she took her time collecting herself, grimacing as she rubbed at her lower back again. When she deemed it suitably less crowded, she picked up her own satchel and made her way out to the bullpen. She, like so many other agents, had been pulled back to desk duty while the SIS desperately scrambled to respond to the events on Ziost and the rumoured infiltration of the agency by the Supreme Chancellor’s office; she didn’t believe for a second that the Supreme Chancellor would bother with infiltrating an organisation that worked for her, not when Director Trant was so far up her ass to begin with, but... well, nobody would’ve thought Shan capable of running illegal black ops with a secret Jedi militia, either.

Regardless, for the foreseeable future, she was relegated to being a data jockey, and she really wasn’t happy about that. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good at it- she was an excellent analyst, thank you very much-, it was more that she was desperate to get back in the field as soon as possible. While the Senate and the SIS scrambled around trying to work out where their attention needed to be focussed, the greater galactic community slowly crumbled into anarchy, with criminals and bullies taking advantage of the chaos and lapsed attention to expand their holdings across every sector of Republic space. All that work she’d put into dismantling entire Exchange cells, all for nothing; by the time they let her get back into the field, the Exchange would’ve bounced back with a vengeance, replacing the networks she’d so meticulously undermined and destroyed from the inside out.

To say she was frustrated at being relegated to analysing flight patterns on Imperial Hyperlanes or decrypting communiques that turned out to be nothing more than internal ship memos regarding rostering duties was the understatement of the century.

The stairs turned sharply and opened out onto a vast hall, the bullpen- a space with at least two dozen more desks than it could comfortably fit crammed into it, over a hundred agents and analysts wedged together in grumbling solidarity. She weaved her way through the narrow paths between the desks, nodding grimly at the few who caught her eye as she walked past. Most of the other staff looked like how she felt, tired and frustrated, with more than a few of them looking wild and red-eyed in a sign they hadn’t slept recently.

And it was noisy, stars. In a stark contrast to the goddamn lecture hall of the last three hours, it was a chaotic tempest of shouting and laughter, of crackling video files and humming data terminals, of chairs scratching on the tiled floor and styluses tapping over screens. Someone was even singing off key; with each new burst of sound, she felt herself twitch unintentionally towards it. A burst of laser fire from a video recording, a shouted name, an argument; it all blurred together into an impossible fusion of noise until Thiare gave up and reached up to turn off her implants. The silence wasn’t perfect, but stars, it was a million times better.

She reached the desk she’d been assigned and dumped her satchel down, slumping into her chair as she ferreted around in the depths of the bag for her drink bottle. There was already an alert flashing on her desk terminal, inevitably her files for the rest of the afternoon, and she felt her spirits flag miserably at the sight of it. She knew, logically, that this analytical work made her job in the field much easier, and that the analysts in the SIS were excellent people who did excellent work, but she just... hated it. She wanted to be out there doing things, helping people, making a tangible difference that she could see and witness herself.

She sighed, rubbing wearily at her face before taking a swig from the bottle. The water tasted stale, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d rinsed out the bottle properly instead of just topping it up. Maybe if she wrote a note for herself...

The files she’d been working on prior to the lecture were fuel shipping manifests out of border and neutral ports, for her to compile a record of what percentage exactly was going to civilian usage and what was going to commercial usage- and what was going to military assets on either side of the border. It was tedious, monotonous work, but fuel was critical, as was maintaining efficient border security. Somebody had to do it, she just resented that right now she was that somebody.

Ugh.

She jumped in surprise when something thudded heavily against her desk, lurching around as someone entered her peripheral vision. A hand landed on her shoulder as if to steady her, and she closed her eyes for a moment in embarrassment at being so jumpy.

A mesmerizingly attractive Mirialan woman sat perched on the edge of her desk, an overly large iced caf in one hand and an equally large pair of sunglasses covering her eyes. Her lips were moving as Thiare turned to face her, and she seemed to realise her mistake a moment later. “Sorry,” Thiare saw her say, as she started to put her drink down on the desk.

The caf was overflowing with chocolate sprinkles and cream, and the outside was dripping with condensation; Thiare absolutely did not want that mess on her desk. “It’s okay,” she said quickly, reaching up to turn her implant back on. She winced at the abrupt input of noise, but the filters kicked in quickly to isolate the background noise and dampen it. She smiled wanly at her. “I can hear now.”

“Sorry sugar,” she drawled, settling more comfortably on the desk. “I’m hungover to hell and back, dunno how good I’d be with my hands right now- and you have no idea how much it pains me to have to say that sentence out loud.”

Thiare laughed awkwardly. “I promise I won’t tell?” she said.

Vitalia Abelli, high-ranking agent with an astounding career in corporate espionage that far outstripped her own achievements of the last few years, beamed at her, and then promptly winced behind the sunglasses. “Good lass,” she said, her voice carrying the distinctly husky rasp of a woman who had not slept a great deal in the last twenty-four hours. “Especially not to Jonas, that bastard will never let me live if he hears-”

‘If he hears what?”

Thiare pressed her lips into a thin line of displeasure as another agent moved over to join them, reaching up as discreetly as possible to adjust her implant again. She really needed to make time to go back to the medical centre and get the technicians to run a diagnostic check on it; it’d been playing up ever since her encounter with Rall on Port Nowhere, no surprise there. The EMP had been a risky choice on her part, but it’d neutralised him sufficiently, and hey- it wasn’t like she wasn’t used to working with little to no audio input already.

Vitalia beamed with far less genuine kindness in her expression, as Jonas Balkar paused beside them, his arms laden with a large plastic tub that seemed to contain the massacred remains of some hapless droid. “Jonas, darling,” she purred, “I thought you were slumming it with the tech nerds in the basement?”

“I’ve been sent as an envoy,” he said, throwing a wink at Thiare. She didn’t respond. “I’m the only one with ties to the outside world, and since I’m the only one up here who can speak nerd-”

“You’ve been sent on the lunch run?”

“Got it in one, darlin’.”

Vitalia tutted, pursing her lips. “Now now, how would your fiancée respond if she heard you calling other women darling?” she said, with false concern in her voice.

The cheery facade slipped ever so slightly, and Jonas’ eye twitched- a poor tell for a man working as a spy. “Come on, Talia,” he said quietly.

“I’m only thinking of you, darling,” she said, very pointedly lifting her caf abomination to her mouth and taking a lengthy drink through the strawer. It seemed to indicate she was done with the conversation, and Thiare desperately hoped that meant they were done with her too, and she could get back to work. “Maybe scooch along now, I’ve got important things to discuss with the lady here.”

No such luck, then.

With one last pitifully puppy like look in their direction, Jonas moved on; Vitalia snorted disdainfully into her drink. “Asshole,” she sniffed. “I wish I didn’t like him so much.”

Stars above and below, it was like being in school again; Thiare stared desperately at her desktop, hoping that Vitalia would get bored of her awkward silence and move on.

The dramatic sigh suggested otherwise. “Now, Thiare darling,” she said, her tone immediately far brighter and more curious, “I hear you had some trouble on Port Nowhere.”

“Is that a joke?” Thiare asked sourly.

Vitalia looked perplexed for a moment, her eyebrows rising behind the sunglasses, before a glorious grin burst out across her face. “Oh shit! I swear it wasn’t, but that’s pretty funny actually.” She cackled once. “Hear. Fucking love it. You’re hilarious Tee.”

“Glad I could provide some amusement,” she said. She didn’t comment further, because she really didn’t want to talk about Port Nowhere, least of all with Vitalia.

The alert on her desk terminal started flashing again, a sign that something else had landed in her inbox with high priority. Right now, she’d take the tedious drudgery of fuel allocation analysis if it meant she could escape from office gossip, or whatever form of mentoring Vitalia was about to foist on her. It wasn’t that she didn’t think Vitalia wasn’t a good agent- she was a great agent, who was almost single handedly responsible for uncovering Solida Hesk’s connections to the Hutt Cartel in the wake of the Makeb catastrophe. She had a way of moving through the cutthroat world of the galaxy’s business elite that was awe-inspiring, leaving scarcely a ripple in her wake to indicate she’d been there, but upending lives and dismantling corporate empires worth billions of credits in a single night.

She was just very... intense. Very loud and cheerful. Flirtatious. Confident. Mostly things that Thiare would never be, and sometimes it was jarring to be around her for too long.

“Listen, if you ever want to do work out of Nowhere, just drop me a line first,” Vitalia continued, oblivious to her foul mood. “I can always butter up Bobbi for you, and it’s always much easier for everyone the less we involve Geralt in something, to be honest. Plus, chances are, I’ve probably already got the intel you want, so it saves you a trip, you know?”

Thiare forced a smile. “Yeah, I know,” she said stiltedly.

Vitalia clapped her on the shoulder. “I don’t know what’s worse, knowing you had a run in with Rall, or with Geralt,” she said, and the lingering grin on her face indicated that it was supposed to be a joke.

Great. She wondered how many other people knew about the incident with Captain Rall.

“Well, I don’t think Rall stole any of my jewellery,” she said, attempting a joke.

Vitalia’s brow furrowed. “Geralt stole your jewellery? That fucker! I told him not to do that to people we know anymore-”

“It was a joke,” Thiare said hastily. “Just a joke, he didn’t take- I mean, I don’t think he took anything-”

“Agent Tana.”

They both looked up to find Director Trant’s personal assistant, a Sephi woman by the name of Katra Vol, standing over them. She was a striking woman, with long ears that tapered to a sharp point above her head, and waist length white hair that she wore tied back severely, and just as she had in the lecture hall, she looked utterly immaculate. Her suit could have come off the rack a few minutes ago, and her shoes were polished to a shine that would put gemstones to shame. She still held her datapad clasped in the crook of her arm, like a clipboard she carried with a list of all the things she found disappointing about them all.

Thiare sat up straighter, trying hopelessly to smooth her hands down her creased pants. “Agent Vol,” she said, “what can I-”

“The Director has been paging you for the last twenty minutes,” she said brusquely, with a look that made Thiare feel like she was about two inches tall. She gestured towards the desk terminal. “Do you make it a habit to ignore the requests of your superiors?”

If the bowels of Coruscant could’ve just opened up in that moment and swallowed her whole, that would’ve been just dandy by her. Thiare closed her eyes to try and stop herself from immediately bursting into tears. “I thought it was just-”

“I don’t care what you thought it was- Director Trant is waiting.”

Vitalia made a rude noise. “Cut her some slack, Vol,” she said.

When Thiare opened her eyes again, Katra was staring coldly at Vitalia with enough frost in her gaze to make a wampa feel chilly. “Agent Abelli,” she said, just as cold as her eyes, “if you do not wish to be written up for both your tardiness and your state of inebriation-”

“Excuse you, I’m hungover, not drunk-”

“Then by all means, keep wasting department time- I can have the forms filled out before you can even make it back to your desk.”

Vitalia made another rude noise, clapping Thiare on the shoulder again as if in consolation. “Sorry sugar,” she said, climbing laboriously to her feet. She offered up a half-hearted salute with her free hand. “Good luck in the rancor’s den.”

“Abelli,” Vol said warningly.

“I’m going, I’m going.”

Which left Thiare alone with Agent Vol; she hastily gathered her things before Katra could inflict that icy cold stare on her again, her hands shaking as she stuffed her work pads back into her satchel. “I’m really sorry,” she said again, rubbing anxiously at her implant as she scrambled to her feet, “I really thought-”

“Director Trant is waiting,” Vol said, turning on her heel and marching smartly in the other direction. Thiare stumbled as she tried to catch up to her, doing her best to match the Sephi’s long-legged stride. The crowded hall seemed to part almost naturally before her, and Thiare tried to shimmy through the gaps before they filled again.

She could count the number of times she’d been called to Director Trant’s office on one hand and have plenty of fingers left to spare, each time no less terrifying than the last. She could guess fairly easily what this was about, but the fact that she’d missed the summons for so long that the Director felt it necessary to send his assistant? Stars, she was in so much trouble.

The turbolift up to the Director’s office was painfully awkward, with Vol staring straight ahead and Thiare too uncomfortable to attempt conversation. The dinging of the doors opening onto the floor of the upper directors and operations chiefs made her jump, and she rushed to keep up with Vol’s brisk step. The tiles clicked almost aggressively under her heels, enough that Thiare almost wanted to turn off her implant.

The doors to Director Trant’s office were open, and Vol marched on in without even knocking; the only thing to do was to follow, lest she incur more scolding, so Thiare hastened in after her, hesitating inside the doorway to wait for further instructions. There were plush carpets on the floor, and the furniture was made of expensive kriin-wood- it was a far throw from the crowded bullpen downstairs, with the cheap desks and plastic chairs. There was even a small bar setting on the side mantle, a crystal decanter holding a deep amber liquid.

She took in all of these details and more in a split second, the mind of an agent cataloguing the contents of the room almost before she realised she was doing it. Director Marcus Trant sat at the large, elegant wooden desk dominating the room, a stylus in his hand and his head bowed over the screen; Agent Vol moved around the desk to stand at his shoulder, ever the obedient watchdog, and Thiare forced herself not to fidget.

Trant didn’t look up immediately, and Vol just stared coldly at her across the desk, and if she’d thought the walk up to the office was agonising, this was far worse. She was clearly being ignored to prove a point, and she felt like a school child being summoned to the principal’s office for punishment.

“Do you know,” Trant said abruptly, not looking up as he spoke, “just how tedious it is to negotiate permits for a neutral space station?”

Thank the stars he was speaking clearly, if he wasn’t going to give her the benefit of looking up. “I’m afraid I do not, Director,” she started to say, but he seemed to be uninterested in her answer.

“A space station capable of hyperspace travel, no less,” he continued, still not lifting his gaze from whatever he was working on at his desk. “Every local government has their own demands and specifications, every hyperspace route their own laws. Each and every sector makes new and different rules in dealing with such a rogue port, on freight taxes and fuel usage and tonnage, on quarantine regulations, on customs violations. If it were a Republic sanctioned port, it would be a standard process maintained by the port commander and the crew, as set out by the guidelines of naval travel approved by the Republic Senate.”

She had no idea what to say to that, so she kept her mouth closed.

“Imagine the concessions necessary for such a port to operate,” he said, a harsh edge creeping into his voice. “Imagine the sheer bureaucratic nightmare of maintaining the peace when such a station exists within Republic space-”

“Sir, I can explain,” she protested.

Trant slammed a hand onto the desk, and she jumped, her heart lurching into her throat. “I really don’t think you can, Agent Tana,” he said, finally looking up at her. His lips were pressed into a thin line of displeasure, and his eyes were narrowed with anger. “Commodore Voresh has already lodged an official complaint with my office _and_ with the Republic Senate for your abuse of their hospitality-”

“I filed my operation report before I left Coruscant! Nobody told me I couldn’t use Port Nowhere for my investigations.”

He stared at her, and she bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from further rambling. Her face was _burning_ , and she felt about two inches tall; she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to burst into tears or start shouting, but the emotional deluge inside of her wanted her to do _something_.

“Please do not interrupt me again, Agent Tana,” he said finally, his voice cold, and she could have kicked herself. He reached for a datapad sitting on the desktop and picked it up with careful deliberation, staring at her the whole time; when he finally looked down at it, she wanted to wilt in relief, but Vol was still staring at her too. “Proposed course of action,” he read aloud, “travel aboard public passenger craft to location Peth-Nern-Seven-Seven-Two, registered name Port Nowhere.”

She closed her eyes. “Sir,” she pleaded.

“What did I say about interrupting me, Tana?” There was silence for a moment, as if he was waiting for the warning to sink in properly this time, and then he continued. “Location Peth-Nern-Seven-Seven-Two, hereafter referred to as Peth-Nern, provides a neutral point from which to enter Alsakan airspace to investigate growth of Black Sun operations in Alsakan sector.”

He set the datapad down on the desk again and folded his hands together before him. “Tell me, Tana,” he said, “precisely where does your report say you intend to slice the security systems of a valued ally to our agency, insult their staff, and instigate a fight that could have very well damaged the structure of the station had it not been interrupted when it was?”

Her mouth moved for a second of its own volition, as she struggled to find words to put into it; her hands twitched in front of her, her fingers angry as she sought to contain her anger and her embarrassment and instead express herself like the professional she was. “I needed to take advantage of the opportunity that presented itself to me,” she started to say, but he cut her off again.

“Nerfshit,” Trant snapped. “If you’d been at all interested in doing your job, you wouldn’t be going off half-cocked like some kind of rogue agent with your own agenda. You would’ve called in your sighting of Rall, and you would’ve asked for permission to proceed, not just recklessly endanger one of the most valuable arrangements we have in pursuit of your own damn glory!”

Thiare’s mouth kept wanting to move, but now her eyes were trying to contribute as well, burning sharp with the threat of tears. Instead, she bowed her head, as if that would mitigate the paralysing shame she felt. It wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all, but... what was it like? How could she explain her motivations without making it sound like she was some rabid gloryhound, only interested in her own victories no matter who she stepped on?

She’d wanted respect for the risks she was willing to take to protect the Republic, not this.

The leather of Trant’s chair squeaked as he leaned back. “Vol,” he said, “please fetch the delivery.”

This piqued her curiosity, despite herself; she glanced up as Agent Vol placed a small shipping box on the desk, no larger than a take-out box from a restaurant. Trant was still staring daggers at her, and she did her best to look contrite.

“In your report on your encounter with Captain Paxton Rall, you indicated that he intercepted you while you attempted to slice into his ship’s security systems,” Trant said. “You said that the two of you fought, and he escaped when Port Nowhere enacted their lockdown protocols after the attack on Ziost, correct?”

Oh no. She didn’t like where this was going. “That’s right, sir,” she said, resisting the urge to lick suddenly dry lips.

“You did not, at any point, indicate that the two of you exchanged any sort of conversation, and you stated that you did not believe he could identify the software you used in the slice, as you deployed an electromagnetic pulse during the altercation.”

She was in so much trouble. “Yes, sir.”

Trant stared at her so hard she felt like his eyes were lasers drilling holes into the back of her skull. “And you did not identify yourself to him at any point, or otherwise give any means for him to deduce your identity and your employer?”

 _Shit_. “I mean- I tried to use a tracker on the ship,” she stammered, “the signal didn’t hold, it’s not standard SIS tech, but if he found it and got it to an expert, it’s likely he could have deduced that it belonged to our agency-”

“Agent Tana, I do not like being lied to,” Trant said, his voice like ice. He gestured sharply to Vol. “Open the box.”

Agent Vol stepped forward with the same brisk efficiency she showed in all tasks, removing the lid of the container and pushing it towards Thiare’s side of the desk. With her stomach in her throat, Thiare crept forward and glanced down into the box. There, nestled carefully in a protective bed of shredded flimsi in a rainbow of colours, was the tracking device- badly damaged, but still recognisable. And beside it-

“This was delivered to my office this morning,” Trant said silkily, and Thiare could feel the alarms flashing in her head, sharp and red and dangerous. He waved a hand magnanimously towards the holopad sitting in the nest beside the tracking device. “Why don’t you press play on the recording for me?”

She didn’t want to. She couldn’t.

“Agent Tana.”

It wasn’t a question, a query after her reluctance. It was an order. She squeezed her eyes tight shut for a moment, as if that would push back the tears, and then pressed play on the holopad. Immediately, an uproariously loud music track started to play, so loud that her implant crackled for a second from the overload. She might have whimpered, she wasn’t sure, but she pressed a hand quickly to the side of her head, fumbling for the controls.

The music was... well, she couldn’t say it was terribly familiar, she wasn’t really up to date on popular music for obvious reasons, but it certainly tugged at her memory. A loud and excitable number, a large choir and an equally large number of instruments- an orchestra? A band? She didn’t know when one became the other. It was exuberant, she’d give it that much.

The holoimage kicked in a moment later, a riot of fireworks exploding in the tiny space afforded by the projector. She’d been expecting a warning, a threat of some kind, not this... _carnival_ display. She glanced up in confusion, but Director Trant’s expression betrayed nothing. “Keep watching,” he said bluntly.

The fireworks seemed to be programmed in time with the music, and she could at least appreciate that. Just as it seemed to be building towards a crescendo near what she assumed was the chorus, there was an explosion of light, and a figure appeared in the middle of the projection space as if like magic.

Paxton Rall.

“Greetings, ladies and sirs and gentle-others,” he thundered dramatically, his jacket billowing as if in a breeze; he bowed extravagantly, dipping one hand down low while his leg swept down low to match. He wore the wretched helmet again, but this time she had her implants activated and she could hear his voice. His voice. Hmm. It was... not what she’d been expecting. Although...

Loud, brash, the twang of an underworld accent? Dramatic, amused, self-aggrandising? Maybe it wasn’t that surprising.

“I am the ineffable Captain Paxton Rall,” he continued, the fireworks continuing to explode in sprays of coloured light behind him, “and it is my utter delight to make your acquaintance today. I trust I am in the company of one Director Marcus Trant of Republic Strategic Information Services, and if not, I would beg to be taken before the gentleman himself, for my message is for his ears first and foremost.”

Thiare couldn’t move. She knew what was coming, like a deer caught in speeder headlights, but for the life of her she couldn’t stop it.

“My dear Director, I bid you greetings from the bridge of the Obsidian Vulture,” Rall continued, “and I politely return to you your misplaced device, which seems to have come into my possession quite by accident. I’m quite certain the esteemed Strategic Information Services would have no desire to make an enemy of someone like myself, not when there are much bigger issues afoot in the galaxy. I’m sure it’s all a terrible misunderstanding, and look forward to continuing our relationship on much more trusting footing.”

Stars above and below, he was even more of a fucking peacock than she could’ve believed possible. He clearly just liked to hear the sound of his own voice.

“To that end,” Rall said, “if you could refrain from sending sad little waifs like Agent Thiare Tana after me, that would be splendid.”

Her blood ran so hot at the sound of her name in that casual drawl that she bit her lip in embarrassment; for a moment, it was enough to distract her from the outrage at having being called a sad little waif.

And the fact that he’d deduced her full name.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate a man using every weapon in his arsenal- and Miss Tana is certainly a very attractive and dangerous weapon, let me tell you- but I’d like to hope there is still room in the galaxy for, shall we say, a Gentleman’s Code? It’s clear Miss Tana is ill-equipped for the brutal violence of my line of work, and it does so break my heart to think of a woman so delicate coming to harm as a result of our little spat. Perhaps a nice desk position would be more suitable for her?”

Thiare felt her jaw drop.

“Regardless, I trust you understand the earnest position from which this gesture comes,” Rall finished. “If you would be so good as to refrain from sending pretty girls ill-suited to the job after me, I’m sure I could find it within myself to only terrorize Republic citizens every, hmm, how does every second Centaxday sound to you?”

He offered another sweeping bow, and the shit-eating grin from beneath the helmet was going to haunt her dreams for weeks, if not months. “A very good afternoon to you, Director,” he said.

The holoimage vanished. A moment later, the music stopped.

She had been so thoroughly outplayed and humiliated by a fucking pirate, there was just- just... there was no coming back from this. She had to kill him. It was the only way to regain even a shred of her dignity. Sad little waif, fuck him! Who the fuck did he think he was?

Agent Vol broke her out of her growing rage, stepping forward and removing the box from the desk before returning to her position at Trant’s shoulder like a fucking parrot. Stars, she really hated that woman. Right now she hated a lot of things. “Sir,” she started, but Trant cut her off yet again.

“You are suspended, Agent Tana,” he said, his voice trembling with scarcely restrained fury, “effective immediately-”

“But sir! You can’t listen to what that jackass has to say-”

“I don’t need to listen to what he has to say, Agent!” Director Trant surged to his feet, and Thiare flinched back from the desk in a panic. “What I see right now is an agent with no respect for the chain of command, an agent who has compromised not only her own safety, but the safety of her colleagues with her own blind arrogance and refusal to follow standard protocols! I see a woman who has jeopardised a crucial alliance, compromised a neutral port, and who couldn’t even use a damn fake name when confronting one of the most dangerous criminals this side of Dromund Kaas!”

Thiare blinked, and then blinked again. She blinked again, but it didn’t seem to be stopping the tears. _Real fucking professional, Tana_ , she thought bitterly. “Please, Director,” she begged.

Director Trant sat back down heavily. “You are on suspended leave for the next month, Tana,” he said flatly. “Now get out of my office.”


	3. Alderaan

_One month later..._

Thiare leaned back in her chair, watching in rapt delight as the lights in the room dimmed slightly, just enough to illuminate the front of the room. Two women stood at the front of the crowd, one of them an elegantly dressed Bothan with the most resplendent coiffure, perfectly rolled and pinned in place with pearl clips, and the other a human woman in far more casual garb, with a jacket and woollen scarf ensemble that looked decent enough, but certainly seemed a little jarring next to the glamorous Bothan beside her. They looked like two ends of a sliding scale. 

The two women were standing with their heads bowed towards one another, as if they were whispering, but the human woman’s hands were doing the talking for her. Thiare tried not to pay too much attention, because she didn’t want to spoil the surprise of the performance, but... alright, she was a _little_ eager to spoil the surprise. It wasn’t often she got to attend poetry readings, but to have the pleasure of attending one with a guest poet who spoke entirely in sign? 

It was a once in a lifetime sort of experience. 

The Bothan moved to the microphone, and Thiare liked to imagine she threw a careful wink her direction as she did so. “Good afternoon, everyone,” she said, her arms held wide. “It is my humble honour to welcome you to my salon today, with special thanks as always to the University of Aldera’s Artistic Laureate program for hosting me these last few years. Welcome, all of you.”

There was a polite smattering of applause, as was to be expected in this sort of gathering, but Thiare was delighted when the visiting poet held up her hands and wiggled her fingers; instead of clapping, she did the same, and the gesture caught the eye of the poet, who grinned at her from the front. It was a little thing, being able to communicate with someone who used the same social expressions as her, but it meant a lot. 

“For those of you who are new to our delightful little gatherings, my name is Maya Woo, and I am the Poet Laureate of Alderaan, a title I am just so honoured to hold.” She held her hands to the side, indicating the woman at her side. “And joining me today for a rather special session is Keeba Tran, renowned poetess of the Chandrilla Art Circle, resident Poetic Voice of Hanna City, and most importantly, my dear friend.” 

This time, Maya matched the hand waving gesture, and after a moment of awkward attempts at clapping, the rest of the crowd followed suit. Keeba was grinning as she stepped up to Maya’s side, and although Maya did an audio translation for the rest of the crowd, Thiare did not need it. 

“Thank you for having me,” Keeba said, her hand gestures sharp and casual. She looked like she was one step away from trying to flirt with the audience, the rakish energy she exuded almost irresistible not to smile at. “It is always a great honour to have the opportunity to share my craft with others- but please, I’ve already heard every joke under the sun about being declared a Poetic Voice when I don’t speak audibly.”

She pulled a face, tongue poking out, and Thiare snorted with laughter; some other members of the audience found it amusing, but a great many of them didn’t seem to know whether it was appropriate to laugh or not. Given how formal these events had been once upon a time, before Maya had taken the Laureate’s seat, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if they found this casual jesting to be outrageously inappropriate.

Maya, by comparison, seemed to be overjoyed at this introduction. “Keeba brings a very unique grasp of poetry and expression to us today, and we have collaborated to bring you a performance of our most recent works in both our languages.”

“The rhythm and metre of a poem rarely translates well into sign language,” Keeba said, her casual shrug and sad expression emphasizing her point, “so as an artist, my journey becomes one not just of translation, but of expression. Of how best to tell a story in my language, and what the story becomes in the telling.” 

Thiare was so enraptured with the performance that for a moment, she didn’t register the way her sixth sense was nagging at her. She couldn’t even pinpoint what it was, but the moment she realised what that vague sense of discomfort was in her belly, she felt her smile falter. She didn’t move excessively, but just casually rolled her head to the side, surveying the rest of the crowd. 

No one was watching her. Everyone was staring at Keeba, their brows furrowed as they tried to follow along with her hands. 

Telling herself she was just being jumpy, she settled back in the chair again, catching Maya’s gaze as she did so. The Bothan woman was still translating for Keeba, but Thiare would be a poor agent indeed not to miss the way her long, furry ears twitched ever so slightly. 

Maya might have been one of the foremost artistic talents in the Republic, a poetess unrivalled in several sectors, but she was also the head of SIS operations in the region. Her art and her position at the university allowed her access to some of the most hallowed circles of Alderaanian society, and her tenure as Laureate meant that she could invite and host all manner of eccentric individuals without scrutiny. She held her gaze for a half second longer, and then glanced away again, all smiles and warmth, but the moment hung with Thiare. 

Was it Maya’s interest that she’d noticed? Had Maya noticed something else, something more threatening, and was trying to impart a warning to her? What was it supposed to mean? 

“We both have solo performances for you this afternoon,” Maya said, and Thiare was suddenly far less interested in the poetry while her head was buzzing with the possibility of threats. “And we have a number of interpretative collaborations, where I will translate for Keeba, and she for me.” 

“We hope you enjoy yourselves,” Keeba finished, signing off with a flourish as she moved to take a seat at the back of the small stage area, behind Maya. 

She cleared her throat delicately, pausing for a moment to gather herself; the lights focussed on her shimmered over the long trains of pearls hanging around her neck, and on the matching pins holding her large hairstyle in place. She looked every part the aristocratic academic, and not at all like an intelligence agent. 

Thiare couldn’t ever do that- be two people at once. She was always the agent, no matter how far she had to vanish into a role, but Maya held down an academic position that required no small measure of work and tutoring and creative output to maintain, all without her commitment to the SIS ever wavering. Thiare had enough trouble maintaining the vague hint of a social life that she did, and as her mother was often pointing out to her, walking her dog was not much of a social life. 

“My first poem today is entitled _'Mask of Flavour'_ ,” Maya said, interrupting her sour train of thought. 

She tried to lose herself in the rhythm and the music of the poetry, but there was a discordant note hanging in the back of her head. It was like an itch between her shoulder blades, and she wanted to keep glancing behind her; in the end, when Keeba got up to do her performance, she turned off her implants altogether, and a small part of her relaxed at not having to deal with processing the thousands of tiny noises in the room that were probably rather easily ignored by everyone else present, but were designed to specifically distract and irritate her. Keeba was a wonder to behold, so dynamic and expressive in her performance, conveying so much nuance in the flow of her fingers and the sharp snap of her wrists. Her face was a canvas of emotion and wit, working in tandem with her hands to tell a story that would be utterly lost in translation were it spoken aloud. 

By the time the two women joined hands and bowed, the lights coming back on slowly, the knot of tension in the middle of her shoulder blades had eased. She’d all but forgotten the sense of being watched, and she was smiling widely as the crowd waved their hands in applause with only a few hesitant claps at the start. 

It wouldn’t be a proper Alderaanian salon without a sumptuous selection of wines and nibbles, and with the lights back on properly, the staff began to move about the room with trays piled high with delectable offerings. Thiare never really came to these parties for the socialising, though, so she stayed in her seat, keeping her eyes carefully averted so that she didn’t accidentally make eye contact with anyone and prompt an unwanted conversation. She’d just wait until there was a lull in the crowd around Maya and then see if she could speak to her in private. 

There were three firm taps against her shoulder, and she turned to see Keeba standing behind her chair, a wide grin on her face. “Hello!” she signed enthusiastically. “May I sit?” 

She didn’t feel like being terribly social, but she was fascinated by the other woman’s poetry; she nodded after only a moment’s hesitation, gesturing to the seat beside her. 

Keeba climbed over the back of the chair like an adolescent rebelling against a teacher, and Thiare knew that if she’d had her implants turned on, she would have heard any number of scandalised gasps from the academic elite. “Maya told me about you,” Keeba said, blissfully unconcerned with the dirty glances being thrown in their direction. “I don’t see a lot of folk like us in this field.”

Thiare pulled a bit of a face, making a hesitant gesture with her hand. “Can’t really say I’m in the field,” she signed back. “I don’t consider myself much of a poet.” 

“The fact that you’re here at all says a lot,” Keeba said, her expression earnest. “How do you know Maya?”

 _We’re spies_ , she thought with wry amusement, but instead she used the comfortable old excuse that had stood the test of time. “My father is a librarian at the university,” she said, smiling at the warmth she felt in her chest at the mention of her papi. 

Keeba pressed a hand to her heart, cocking her head to the side. “So I have him to thank for the emphasis on deaf literature at Aldera?” 

Thiare laughed softly. “He went crazy with it ever since I lost my hearing as a kid,” she signed. She tapped the implant tucked behind her ear. “These help some of the time. Nice to have poetry I don’t have to listen to, though.” 

Tapping two of her own fingers against her lips, Keeba grinned past the gesture. “Good thing too, since I don’t speak at all.” 

“I’m almost jealous- people think that if you can speak at all, it means you aren’t _really_ deaf-”

“Oh, and when they shout in your face? To test you?” 

“Do they really think showering us in spit makes us want to talk to them _more?_ ”

Keeba’s nose scrunched up with silent laughter, as she rested a foot up on the chair. “You should come out to Chandrilla some time,” she signed, with all the enthusiasm of someone speaking to a friend they’d known all their life, not just a stranger they’d met minutes ago. “We’ve got a really great deaf community, arts based of course, but we have other activities. Theme nights and stuff.” 

Thiare genuinely hesitated. There was a part of her that longed for such companionship, for people who could understand the same frustrations and share in the same joys, but at the same time... she was an intelligence agent, albeit a technically suspended one. She didn’t want to endanger such a wonderful community just by being selfish for company. “I don’t travel much,” she hedged instead, “but if I do, I’ll be sure to check it out.” 

That seemed to satisfy Keeba, who patted her firmly on the shoulder. “Brilliant,” she signed, climbing to her feet. “You can even bring your shy friend.”

She blinked as she watched Keeba turn away, a cold shiver dancing all the way up her spine; if she’d been a little more in control of her wits, she would have grabbed her wrist and pulled her back and asked her urgently what she meant, who it was in the room that she’d assumed was her friend. As it was, by the time she stumbled to her feet, Keeba had already been swept away by a trio of eager academics, signing clumsily and talking as loudly and slowly as a bantha hollering in a sandstorm. She didn’t even need to activate her implant to know that they were shouting, just as she and Keeba had complained about minutes earlier. Keeba, clearly well versed in such behaviour, weathered it with outstanding aplomb. 

The shiver between her shoulder blades hadn’t been a mistake earlier- someone _had_ been watching her. 

She felt a hand settle in the small of her back, and she nearly elbowed them right in the face; only extreme self restraint and long hours of training managed to override her initial jolt of panic, and for that she was excessively grateful when she glanced to the side and saw Maya behind her, and not some mystery villain. 

Maya smiled, her whiskers quivering as if she seemed to sense the rush of fearful adrenalin in her. She tapped the side of her head, and in response, Thiare reached up and activated her implants. “My dear Thiare,” Maya said, all broad smiles and relaxed body language, “I trust you enjoyed yourself today?” 

From somewhere, she managed a smile, even though she just wanted to grab Maya by the shoulders and ask her what she’d seen. “It was so good,” she said, pausing to clear her throat after the first few words came out raspy. “You really have made these afternoons so much more enjoyable since you joined the college.”

The Bothan woman beamed happily at her. “I’m so happy you think so,” she said, tucking her arm through hers as if they intended to stroll around the room together. With her free hand, she reached down and took hers, and Thiare felt her slide a datachip into her palm. “I’m always so grateful you can take time out of your busy schedule for my little afternoon diversions.” 

Maya had been very carefully funnelling her analytical work these last few weeks, at express odds with Director Trant’s suspension order; when Thiare had queried her about it, back when Maya had visited her at her family’s home, she’d just smiled over her cup of tea, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Marcus has so much on his plate at the moment,” she’d said simply. “I very much doubt he has time to check the names of the analysts on every single report filed by every single sector chief, wouldn’t you think?” 

And so in spite of her suspension, Thiare had spent the past month working from her parent’s home, sulking about the reprimand while she toiled over countless hours of data analysis. Oh, there was some merit to be had in that sort of work, certainly, and she was immensely grateful to Maya for the opportunity to help instead of sitting hopelessly on her hands for the whole month, but... stars, she wanted to be back out in the field! She wanted to be doing her job, her _real_ job, not this endless file work! 

She’d had a contact send her a lead about Exchange activity out of Mek-Sha, and she wanted to pursue it before the trail went cold, but she couldn’t very well go charging off on a hunch unauthorised. That’s what had gotten her into this mess in the first place. 

“Tell me, Thiare my dear,” Maya said, interrupting her train of thought, “do you have any plans in the near future? Your father informs me you intend to visit family on Coruscant.”

A turn of phrase that Thiare took to mean that Director Trant was finally going to allow her back to work. “I’d certainly like to, yes,” she said, just as casually. “I haven’t heard back in the last few days, though, so I don’t know when I’m flying out yet.”

“Oh, you should definitely call, dear.” Maya stopped a waiter and plucked a champagne flute from their tray; Thiare shook her head no when offered one. “You know what family are like, sometimes you have to be direct. You’d hate to be late.” 

Message received. “I’m going to miss spending time with you, though,” she said, smiling fondly at her; she was a little surprised to find that she meant it, that she did actually feel mournful at the prospect of missing these afternoon sessions and Maya’s quick witted warmth. 

Maya made an odd noise, something not quite a coo and not quite a purr, and she patted her gently on the arm. “There’s always room for you in my salons, my dear,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me, I must see to my other guests-”

She needed to risk it. “Maya,” she said quickly, “someone was watching me during the performance.”

The Bothan looked surprised, but then her snout crinkled with a smile. “Indeed,” she said candidly. “The poor fellow seemed quite smitten.”

Thiare almost reeled back, shaking her head in confusion. “What? No, that’s not-”

Something sharpened in Maya’s expression, a steely look coming into her eyes. “My dear Thiare,” she said, lowering her voice so that Thiare had to strain to hear her over the background noise of the gathering, “surely you would not be suggesting that I would be so lax with my own security?” 

“Keeba saw him!” 

“Keeba saw a young man staring at you like a spellbound pup, nothing more.”

She felt her cheeks heat, and she bit the inside of her lip. “Can you at least tell me who he was?” she asked. “What he looked like?”

Maya looked at her pityingly. “If I thought you were interested in such details to pursue the young man for a courtship, then of course. But I’ll not have you harassing my guests-”

Something clicked in her head. “He was a twi’lek, wasn’t he?” she said.

Her hostess’ expression soured. “It was _not_ Rall,” she said primly. 

“How do you know?”

“Well, for one thing, he had a delightful yellow hue to his skin, not purple. For another, he had no tattoos.” Her expression hardened further. “And for another, I make it a habit not to endanger my guests by inviting known criminals to my salon.” 

Thiare wanted to stamp her feet in frustration. “Maya,” she tried, pleadingly.

“Good day, Miss Tana,” Maya said, disengaging with a cheerful wave that was insultingly fake. “I do hope you will join us again in the future!”

Thiare was left standing with her mouth agape and her face red, as Maya swanned over to a cluster of attendees with a grandiose “Darlings!” to announce herself. She could feel their eyes on her, even though nobody was looking at her directly, and it made her skin crawl. Looking around, there was no sign of this mysterious twi’lek gentleman who had stared at her so fondly, and she certainly didn’t _know_ any twi’lek gentlemen who might have spent enough time in her company to find reason to stare fondly. What had promised to be a pleasant afternoon diversion had soured significantly, and she was feeling emotionally raw and embarrassed. 

That seemed to be her default state of being these days. 

With a huff, she stuffed her hands into her pockets, stalking towards the door without another glance at the gathering. The winding stairs down from the salon to the front of the estate gave her plenty of time to stew in the privacy of her own head, and the exercise gave her an outlet for the frustration bubbling around inside of her. When she arrived in the grand atrium, she wasn’t precisely in a better mood, but she was at least glad to be moving again. Glad to be out of that room of secrets and entendres- even if they weren’t spies, everything in the upper echelons of society felt like it was just as tangled and complicated as her literal undercover work. She didn’t have the patience for it.

She stopped by the front door, waving down the butler as she did so; she knew the man well enough from all of her previous visits that she didn’t have to explain herself. She wasn’t entirely certain that he was a certified agent, but he was definitely well aware of his mistress’ double life. “Mam’selle Tana,” he said, bowing neatly. “Shall I have the kennel staff bring your hound around to the yard?” 

“If she even wants to leave,” Thiare said with a grin. “She’s so spoiled here.”

“Lady Lulu is a beloved guest amongst the staff,” he said, moving to the staff alcove by the front door and pressing a button on the console. “They shall arrive shortly.”

Thiare shuffled in place for a moment, debating whether or not to risk asking. 

He simply raised an eyebrow at her. 

She sighed in aggravation. “There was a guest here today,” she said, crossing her arms forcefully. “A twi’lek.”

The eyebrow went back down, and he fixed her with a critical, somewhat pitying look. “Due to the nature of my lady’s affairs, I cannot disclose information regarding the identity of her guests-”

“Oh, don’t give me that nerfshit. You know I have the same _‘affairs’_ as her.”

He breathed out sharply. “I have taken specific oaths to protect the operations undertaken by my lady,” he said in a low voice. 

“And I have reason to believe that one of the guests today might represent a very real threat to those operations,” she countered. “Please, Toufric.” 

With an aggrieved sigh, he moved around to the staff console, activating one of the screens. He was silent for a moment, perusing the data, before announcing “There was one twi’lek gentleman in attendance today. A nobleman from Chalacta, one Lord Stoha Whei.”

Thiare blinked. “I’m sorry, could you say that again?” she said, reaching up to poke at her implant. “I think I misheard you.”

He turned the screen to face her, and she huffed out a breath as she saw the spelling. “Just me, then,” she said, rubbing awkwardly at her neck. “Never mind.”

There was a boisterous bark from outside. “If that will be all, Mam’selle?” 

Stars, she’d really made an idiot of herself today. “Thanks,” she said, trying to rouse as much genuine appreciation as her sour mood allowed of her. She turned and made her way to the door, and was almost knocked clean off her feet a moment later by a brown, fluffy shape that was approximately ninety percent leg. Stumbling back a step, she managed to keep her feet under her mostly out of practice; a laugh escaped her, and a set of feet scrambled up the front of her, paws pressing hard against her chest as an overexcitable tongue tried desperately to slobber all over her face. “Hey, Lulu,” she managed, jerking out of range as the tongue lunged for her mouth. “I thought you’d be worn out by now, pup.”

One of the kennel staff jogged around the corner sheepishly, holding a leash out to her with an apologetic expression on her face. Thiare sighed, nodding her thanks before kneeling to try and corrall her dog into a headlock to get her leash back onto her collar. After a moment of play wrestling, Lulu finally obliged her, and with the leash firmly attached to her overly excitable pup, Thiare set off for home. 

It was a lovely autumn day, the sun warm overhead with just a hint of a cool breeze coming in over the plains; Lulu trotted happily beside her, veering off the path every now and then to snuffle at something in the grass and the bushes. She could have taken a speeder back to the other end of town, but she spent so much of her life cooped up in Coruscant, or running ops on filthy industrial moons and arid pirate dens, that it was always such a literal breath of fresh air to come home to Alderaan. She could even put up with her mother’s nagging about her woeful romantic life, and her siblings' endless jibes about her being married to her job, because there was something so good for the soul to wake up in the morning and see the sunlight unfiltered, to smell the cool alpine scent of the mountains and the forests. 

She saw a few other folk on the walk- joggers, mostly, and a young couple who were clearly on some kind of date as they clutched each others arms fiercely, heads bowed together as they giggled by the lake. Thiare gave them a wide berth, her free hand stuffed into her pocket to ward off the faint chill in the air; this, of course, left her fingers free to toy with the datachip in her pocket, wondering what sort of mundane files she’d be sorting through this time. Glancing around and noting that the particular stretch of parkland they were in was largely uninhabited, she leaned down and unclipped Lulu’s leash, laughing to herself as the dog shot off like a rocket, sprinting around in a wide circle across the lush meadow. 

Thiare kept an eye on her as she made her way over to a nearby park bench, settling herself down in a patch of mottled shade- just enough sunshine to keep warm, without risking getting sunburnt. Lulu raced and frolicked, rolling onto her back and hurling tufts of grass into the air. Smiling absently at her antics, Thiare pulled a datapad from her satchel, inserting the datachip a moment later. While Lulu played, she scrolled through the files, looking to see what it was that Maya had entrusted her with this time. 

A single word in an audio transcript caught her attention- Zakuul. She frowned. She didn’t recognise it, and the translation software wasn’t offering any alternatives. She scrolled back to the top, checking to see where it had come from. Perhaps it was a Sith word? But surely her translation software would’ve picked up on it, and offered some kind of explanation- 

She realised abruptly that Lulu was barking, and probably had been for some time by the sound of it; her head jerked up, her stomach lurching briefly when she couldn’t see her dog immediately. She fumbled to her feet, finally spotting movement on the far side of the park that looked like an overly bouncy Lulu. She set off at a jog towards her, calling out her name. Lulu, however, seemed uninterested in dashing to her side, and the reason for that became apparent a moment later when a figure very abruptly sat up from the grass, and Lulu lunged for them. 

Her blood ran cold. “Lulu!” she yelled, breaking into a sprint. She thought she could hear yelling, but she didn’t have time to work out what they were saying. “Lulu, stop!”

She was perhaps a half dozen yards away when she realised that the shouts were not those of panic and pain, but of laughter. Likewise, Lulu was not rending at a helpless victim, but was bounding around merrily and play wrestling with the figure on the ground. She skidded to a halt, breathing heavily, shoulders sagging in relief even as her face heated at her unnecessary panicked sprint across the meadow. 

She bent over, hands resting on her knees as she tried to catch her breath, and the figure turned towards her. A yellow twi’lek with no tattoos. 

He was smiling broadly, laughing as Lulu continued to leap and bound all over him, trying desperately to lick his face while he tried to fend her off. “My apologies, madam,” he said, in a thick Huttese accent. “I did not mean to steal your companion away from you.” 

Thiare straightened, trying to keep a neutral, relaxed pose as she examined him. “It’s no problem,” she said, taking in the rich cut of his clothing, the glitter of gold on his fingers. The chances that this was not the same gentleman as the one that had been ogling her during the poetry readings were almost impossibly slim- she’d bet another month of suspension on that fact. “Are you alright?”

He gestured to Lulu, who was finally starting to calm down, still climbing all over him but with far less bounce involved. “As alright as a man can be when assailed with such a determined young lady,” he said, laughing boisterously every time she tried to get in close for another lick. “Oh, I say!”

There was something wrong with his voice. She was really bad at analysing any sort of audio, and voices were no different, but there was something _not right_ about his voice. Was it the accent? It sounded... ugh, what was the word, forced, maybe? Accents made her life torture most of the time anyway, there was no way she could accurately determine when one was fake or not. “ _Lulu_ ,” she scolded, moving forward to pull her dog off the poor man, “come here girl.”

“Quite alright, quite alright,” the gentleman said, “I do understand- I am quite irresistible, after all.”

She pulled a face before she could help herself, then hid it immediately when she realised what she was doing. Her sixth sense was going crazy. “You were at the poetry recital, weren’t you?” she hedged, kneeling quickly to hook Lulu’s leash back on again. 

His face lit up. “Indeed!” he said.

Thiare nodded slowly. “You, uh, didn’t hang around afterwards,” she said casually. “For the mingling.”

He leaned back on one hand, the other pressed to his forehead dramatically. “It pained me to leave such an esteemed gathering so early,” he said, “but alas, I had another appointment to attend.”

Thiare made an understanding noise. “I hope your appointment understands that you’re late because you were lying in the grass to play with my dog,” she said pleasantly. Not accusing, precisely, but certainly pointing out the absurdity of his claim. Pleasantly. 

He winked. He _actually_ winked. “I’m sure I can be forgiven for being tempted by the company of two such fine young ladies,” he said. 

There was an alarm light, flashing slowly in her head. Like a beacon, warning travellers not to dash themselves against the field of asteroids in the darkness of space. “You are too kind, sir,” she said, making a show of carefully stowing her holopad back in her satchel; as she did so, she carefully activated the ion charge shield on her wrist that was cleverly disguised as an antique bracelet. Normally, it acted as a subtle scrambler, a means to mask her presence from any recording equipment, but as she set it to the most aggressive frequency with a nudge from her thumb, she was hoping for a different result. “Can I help you up?”

“My very own champion, come to rescue me,” he said, and she fought the urge to roll her eyes with everything in her. Even if she was wrong about this- and she didn’t think she was- she couldn’t exactly go sneering at foreign nobility when her dog had just been in the process of mauling them affectionately. He held out his hand, wiggling his fingers in her direction. “Tell me, champion- do you have a name?” 

She reached for him, using the arm with the bracelet. “My name is Thiare,” she said.

“A pretty name for a pretty lady.”

 _A pretty name for a pretty liar._

She grasped him by the wrist, heaving backwards to pull him to his feet- and the overloaded charge in the bracelet ran down her am and into his, shorting out the battery in the holoshroud he was wearing. With a flicker and a spark, the battery pack on his belt died, and the image of yellow skin flashed twice before vanishing entirely. 

Leaving the purple skinned, tattooed form of Paxton Rall standing in front of her. 

Thiare pulled back her free arm and punched him. 

The charming smile had held for a second as he’d found his feet, but the murderous look in her eyes and the loud crackle of the device at his waist was enough for it to falter; not fast enough, though, because her fist connected with his cheek before he could lunge out of range, and he staggered backwards from the blow. Lulu immediately started barking, tugging and jumping as much as her leash would allow her; Thiare tried her best to keep her out of the way as she charged after Paxton. “Bloody hell, woman!”

“Don’t you _‘bloody hell woman’_ me!” she snarled, trying for another blow. He managed to avoid this one, jerking his head out of the way as he hastily retreated backwards over the grass. “What the fuck are you even doing here? Are you stalking me?” 

“That’s rich coming from the woman who tried to break into my home and planted tracking bugs on it,” he said, ducking under another punch. “Fuck, woman, calm down!” 

She kicked him instead, making him howl in pain as her booted foot connected with his shin. “I’m not the fucking criminal using a fucking disguise to follow someone!” 

Another kick had him stumbling, and then he went down on one knee as he lost his balance entirely. “Fuck!” he yelled, holding both arms out above his head. “Alright, alright, fuck, calm down-”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!”

Lulu surged past her and barrelled into him, knocking him over onto his back. She went to scold her, but she stood rather firmly on his chest, her paws pressing down on his shoulders keeping him flat on his back. She barked in his face once, licking his chin rather aggressively a moment later. “Pfeh,” he grumbled, trying to twist away from the tongue. “Could you keep your beastie out of this?” 

“Don’t call my dog a beastie,” she snapped, but she obliged reluctantly, tugging on Lulu’s leash until she stepped back onto the grass. He started to sit up, but she replaced Lulu’s paws with her own boot, pressing him squarely in the chest so that he stayed on the ground. “And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you right in the middle of your smug face.”

He grinned up at her, and her treacherous hormones immediately rallied in his defence. “You wouldn’t ruin a face this pretty,” he said, winking again. There was already a large lump swelling on his cheekbone where she’d struck him, so it made the wink look comically exaggerated. “And you’re far too curious to off me without getting your answers, darlin’.”

She scowled at him, pressing down harder with her boot until he grunted in pain. “Do not call me darling,” she said.

He sighed. “Fine then, Thiare-”

“Or that. Agent. You will call me Agent.” 

The grin turned calculating. “Very well, Agent Tana,” he purred.

Oh, that wasn’t any better. “What are you doing here?” she said instead. She looked around towards the treeline. “Are your cronies here?” 

“Sadly for me, Agent Tana, I am alone,” he said. “Although we could make use of our solitude.”

She blinked, trying to process his words. “Are you... are you flirting with me?” she asked incredulously. 

He shrugged, an awkward gesture given that he was flat on his back and her foot was keeping him pinned to the ground. “All I’m saying is that I’m not at all opposed to the position we find ourselves in,” he said. “Always was a fan of a lady on top.” 

Her face grew so hot she could probably have cooked on egg on it. “What are you doing here?” she hissed instead, “You have ruined my life-”

Something hardened in his expression. “I ruined your life?” he said, just as incredulously as when she’d asked if he was flirting. “You didn’t spend the last month of your life in hospital rehab getting your bloody arm repaired! Nor, might I add, did you lose your income while you were placed on leave-”

“You don’t have an income, you just steal, that’s not the same at all!” 

“Of course a bloody goody two-shoes like you’d think some nerfshit like that,” he said. “Some people gotta make ends meet however they can-”

She pressed down harder. “You steal from banks, and merchants. You raid pleasure cruises. You kill people-”

“What, and you never killed anyone getting your job done?” He scoffed. “Pull the other one, love, it’s got bells.”

“So, what, you followed me to get your revenge for your own stupidity? Were you going to try and rob me?” 

“Maybe it was to remind you not to do anything stupid,” he said loudly, grabbing at her ankle. She stiffened in alarm, but he didn’t do anything to try and topple her over. “Month’s up, love, so if you’re going back to being a good little lapdog for your precious Republic, it’s in your best interest not to come after me.” 

Damn it, she should’ve brought a blaster with her. “And you thought the best way to get your message across was to fucking _stalk_ me?” she asked. 

“Don’t flatter yourself, love-”

“Stop calling me that!” 

“We both know you’re fucking little league junior compared to ol’ Paxton,” he continued. “It’s gonna be much worse for you than it is for me if you don’t leave this be.”

She stared down at him. He grinned, and it didn’t seem charming; it seemed malicious. In him, she saw the manifestation of every single person who thought she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t capable enough. His stupid asinine flirting just made it worse, because he clearly thought she’d fall into his lap immediately, he clearly thought she’d be simperingly grateful to have someone as handsome and charming as he was pretending to be interested in her. 

She was tired of being underestimated. 

“Paxton Rall,” she said, “by the power vested in me by the Galactic Republic-”

“Bit soon for marriage vows, ain’t it sweetheart?”

“I am placing you under arrest,” she said, and his expression dropped like a stone. “On the charges of piracy on multiple counts, disruption of mercantile services, second degree murder on multiple counts, deprivation of liberty, kidnapping, bribery-”

“Think about what you’re doing here, love,” he warned, the hand on her ankle tightening. 

“Maybe consider not underestimating me next time just because I’m a woman,” she said, pulling her commlink from her pocket. She didn’t break eye contact with him as she lifted it to her mouth. “This is Agent Tana of Strategic Information Services, requesting field backup from Aldera City Guard. I repeat, Agent Tana of Strategic Information Services, requesting field backup from the Guard of Aldera.”

There were a few moments of silence, and she never even blinked as Paxton held her gaze. And then- “Agent Tana, this is Guard of Aldera headquarters, please state your location and requirements.”

“Thiare,” Paxton said warningly. 

“I have a known fugitive in custody for transport to a secure facility,” she said. “Sending coordinates now.” 

“Roger that, Agent Tana. Coordinates received. We have dispatched a squad to your location.” 

She disconnected, and put the commlink back in her pocket. At her side, Lulu started howling, just like she always did whenever she could hear sirens. “I don’t underestimate you because you’re a woman,” Paxton tried, laying on the charm as thickly as possible. “Next time I might not be so gentlemanly.”

As Lulu continued to howl and tug on the leash, a speeder car appeared over the trees on the far side of the meadow, gliding slowly towards them. She smiled. “There won’t be a next time, Captain Rall,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those interested, Lulu is a schnoodle- specifically she is modelled after @magesmagesmages' beautiful pup Bowie, who is (like Lulu) 90% leg. 
> 
> And for those wishing to know more about deaf poetry, there's some really great organisations out there like ASL Slam, please watch this video here for a quick summary of what their art is like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmsqXwnqIw4


	4. Breakout

_A week or so later..._

Paxton sat with his legs stretched out before him, his socked toes bouncing along to his tone deaf humming; his back was pressed to the cool wall of the cell, which was delightfully refreshing against the ache in his left shoulder. Bella always told him that he needed to use heat packs when his implants were playing up, so that the muscles didn’t seize up around the machinery, but there was just something so wonderful about the brisk touch of cold from the metal wall that he couldn’t say no to.

He also couldn’t say no to Bella, so he’d have to make sure not to tell her later.

As his humming continued, he heard an aggrieved sigh come from beyond the forcefield covering the front of his cell. There was a squeak of a chair being pushed backwards, and a set of footsteps drew closer, until a balding middle-aged human man stood before his prison, hands on hips as he glared in at him.

“Rall,” he said, his baritone thick with the very distinct Aldera accent, “that’s enough.”

From where he sat on his rather threadbare prison cot, Paxton spread his arms wide imploringly. “Why, my dear Warden Brell, whatever could you be referring to?”

The look the man gave him was nothing short of venomous. “Cut the crap,” he said. “No more singing.”

“But sir! I must protest, I was not singing-”

“Whatever noise you were making, that damned caterwauling, it stops now.”

He pouted magnificently. “Do you not get impossibly bored down here, with no stimulation?” he asked. “Is Alderaan not known for her stirring verses, her epic operas? Are we not in the cultural heart of the Republic itself, and yet we sit in silence? For shame!”

Warden Brell shook his head, rolling his eyes as he turned and walked away.

“Brell? My dear Brell?” Paxton grinned to himself, imagining he could hear the teeth grinding going on. “Don’t say you’ll leave me in the silence again, I couldn’t bear it.”

“Shut up, Rall.”

He settled back against the wall, waiting a few beats before softly resuming the humming. If Brell could hear him, he didn’t give any indication.

That was half the fun of getting imprisoned in Republic space- they had all these rules and regulations, all these damned moral and ethical codes that kept them leashed up tighter than a patron of a fetish club, and he knew for a fact they weren’t getting nearly as much satisfaction out of it as the latter was. He could push and prod and nag and whine, and they just gritted their teeth and looked away, desperate to shut him up but impossibly bound up in regulations that commanded them to treat him decently. Sure, he was imprisoned against his will, but he was warm, and he had three good meals a day, and he had a blanket for the bed- which was certainly more than he could say for most of his youth in a Sith slave labour camp. And there was something inexplicably delightful in riling up the ones responsible for his imprisonment, seeing the heat and the anger build in their eyes as he toyed with their fraying nerves, waiting to see what precisely it would take to make them crack and lash out physically.

It was a delightfully violent game, and he loved it ever so much. It made these relentlessly droll hours of captivity far more bearable.

It was only bad at night, really, when the bustle of the headquarters died off, the lights dimmed but never entirely dark. The lack of darkness made him tired, and irritable, and he tried to hide it as best as he could, but being trapped in a cell didn’t exactly go a ways to soothing the panic. Maybe that’s why he delighted so much in needling the guards, trying to make their time just as unpleasant as his.

“Brell,” he called loudly, hiding his cackle when he heard a muttered curse from the guard station down the hall. “Brell, you forgot the chocolate on my pillow this morning. I’m going to complain to the manager.”

“Shut the fuck up, Rall.”

“And the _language!_ At this rate, I’m going to drop my review from three stars down to two and a half, and _no_ , I _won’t_ take a coupon for a free breakfast on my next visit to reconsider my rating, thank you.”

He heard the chair squeak violently as the Warden stood up again. This one was far too easy to rile up. “Listen here, you pirate fuck-”

“I’m listening,” he replied in a sing-song voice.

An explosion sounded from nearby, dull and booming, and Paxton felt the rattle through the wall at his back. He couldn’t have timed that better.

“Should I still be listening, my dear Brell?” he called. “Brell?”

Beyond the bounds of his cell, he could hear the warden speaking rapidly into the comms unit on his desk; Paxton considered trying to listen in, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, he crossed his arms loosely, enough so that his right hand was resting against the metal plates of his cybernetic forearm on the left- and enough so that he could quite easily access the tap pad installed in the wrist.

Prisons always checked for high tech gadgets, and always blocked traditional holo and tech signals; no one ever bothered to monitor basic shit like tap code. And because the Republic were ever so polite and considerate towards the needs of their prisoners, regardless of how dangerous they were, they never thought it appropriate to confiscate his arm. Oh, they always checked it to make sure there was nothing sordid hidden within, no secret knives or commlink ports or the like. A tap pad just looked like another piece of plating, and no one ever questioned it.

_One guard_ , he tapped carefully, keeping a close eye on the forcefield to make sure that Brell didn’t come surging back into view. _No secondary exits._

He held his thumb to the pad, and a moment later felt the slow and steady response come through. _Roger that_ , came the careful tapping. _Securing upstairs._

With a grin, he settled in to wait, keeping his arms crossed in preparation of any more messages; not a moment too soon, because Brell came careening down the hall, skidding to a halt in front of his cell. “You did this,” he hissed, fumbling for the blaster at his hip. “This is your doing!”

He pouted. “Now, Warden, that hurts my feelings when you say such awful things,” he said. “Has not Alderaan been at war with itself for the better part of ten years now? And yet your first instinct is to blame the painfully innocent gentleman who has been locked up for days without reprieve-”

“Shut up! How did you do it?”

He lifted his arms wide, a gesture of imploring innocence. “How could I do what, my dear Brell? To suggest that you suspect me of foul deeds also implies that I have done so under your supervision, and I would hate to besmirch your outstanding reputation-”

Another explosion sounded, closer than the first, and a fine layer of dust was dislodged from the ceiling. It settled slowly over the scene, and Paxton quite pointedly reached down to brush at the edge of his blanket. “Could you be a dear and call housekeeping for me?” he said blithely. “It’s just that I don’t have a holo in my quarters-”

“Rall!”

“Yes, dear warden?”

Something sounded from nearby, a dull fwoosh noise, and something collided violently with Warden Brell, sending him hurtling down the corridor and out of sight with a surprised bellow. Paxton feigned an exaggerated wince. “Is that a no on the housekeeping, then?” he yelled.

A large figure swaggered into view, and despite his absolute confidence in the caper, his heart still soared at the sight of his second in command. Bloodhound had a slight cut on her brow, the blood trickling down the curve of her montrals, but she otherwise looked hale as she came to a stop before his cell, a giant cannon resting on one shoulder. Her two giant sibian hounds came snuffling up beside her, panting loudly as long strands of drool dangled from their toothy maws.

He pressed his hands to his heart. “You are a sight for sore eyes, my love,” he professed.

Bloodhound rolled her eyes. “And you are an idiot,” she said, glancing down at the end of the hallway where Brell had been thrown. She pointed firmly, and both hounds eagerly followed the line of her finger. “Up up. Go.”

The two ugly white beasts went sprinting out of sight, and a moment later Brell shrieked in terror.

“Bella, dearest, you know it takes forever to get the blood out of their white coats,” he scolded.

“I know that problem intimately, which is why you will be the one cleaning them when we get back to the ship,” she said, as the screams continued to echo from further down.

“What? How is that fair?”

“I’m not the dumb bastard who went and got captured in the first place-”

“I wasn’t _captured_ , per se, it was all part of my cunning plan! Which, speaking of, don’t let your dear pups eat the security card to let me out.”

Bloodhound smirked. “I brought my own security card,” she said, turning towards the stairs. She cupped a hand to her mouth. “Xuan? Xuan! Get down here!”

There was a wordless grumble from nearby, only just audible over the distant sounds of blaster fire, and the more immediate sounds of delighted canine munching; after a few moments, a rather large green gentleman appeared in the doorway, carrying a large circular piece of metal. It could’ve passed as a shield, if you didn’t know what you were looking at, but Paxton was quite well acquainted with this particular device.

Xuan was almost as tall as Bella, and his dark black hair was tied back in a tight braid that nearly rivalled her lekku for length. He was impossibly beautiful, despite the disgusted sneer he wore upon his face. “Rall,” he said, more of a grunt than a word.

“That’s Captain Rall to you,” Paxton said, swinging himself up to his feet. “Of course, my darling Xuan, I’m sure I could find it in my heart- and my bed- to give you the freedom to refer to me so informally-”

“Stand back,” Bloodhound said, as Xuan stepped up to the forcefield. He held the spherical piece of metal in the centre, and two long arms shot out from either side; once the arms made contact with the sides of the forcefield frame, Xuan activated something on his side of the device and stepped back, as the metal began to creak and groan and whine impatiently. The forcefield began to spark and flutter, and Paxton was grateful he’d kept his socks on to deter the electrical charge from seeking him out. Cracks begin to race outwards from the pressure point, an intricate web of lines that grew wider as the groaning grew louder.

Finally, with a loud crunch, the hardened durasteel walls on the outside of the frame cracked as well, and the door frame lurched out of position, hanging by a few loose cables as it sparked and hissed. Dusting himself off, Paxton stepped through the wreckage as Xuan collected the lock breaker from the floor and hooked it onto his back, just as if it were as inoffensive as a shield all along. “Xuan, when are we going to stop playing this foolish game and just give in to our passions?” he said, winking when the Falleen glared at him.

Bella cuffed him over the back of the head. “Stop teasing,” she said.

He spun to face her, hands raised in protest. “I’ll stop when he stops making it so easy to rile him up!”

She rolled her eyes at him, then turned towards the end of the hall. “Zhiva. Boskalla. Up up, let’s go.” The two hounds gruffled happily and came barrelling towards them, and Paxton turned his nose up at the sight of their slimy, blood-smeared faces. Bloodhound, however, seemed not to care in the slightest. “What good girls you are,” she crooned, crouching down to scratch them both soundly on the head. One of them sat down hard on it’s bony backside, a back leg kicking feebly out of sheer delight. “That’s right, you’re such good girls.”

There were sirens wailing in the distance, and the occasional round of blaster fire going off in nearby corridors. Xuan was still glaring at him like he wanted to gut him with just his hands for the job, and Bella’s delightful pups were utterly revolting to look upon normally, let alone when they had chunks of uneaten flesh hanging from between their large, snaggled teeth. “Is everything else on schedule?” he asked instead, keeping his eyes far above the line of sight where he’d be forced to look upon the ugly beasties. Ugh, and she’d told him he’d have to bathe them later. Goddess have mercy.

Bloodhound climbed back to her full height, checking the chrono on her wrist as she did so. “We’ve got another six minutes before first responders arrive,” she said calmly. “Fastest time on the simulations was the Royal Guard coming from the palace barracks, closely followed by the Guard of Aldera units stationed at the treasury.”

He pursed his lips. “I’d suggest we get moving, but I’d hate to be seen in such a state,” he said, gesturing to his socked feet and lack of armour. “Alderaan is one of _the_ fashion capitals of the Republic, after all, I can’t be seen in anything other than my best-”

Xuan snapped something in his native tongue, stalking for the stairs without a backwards glance.

“Mauler is waiting upstairs with your gear,” Bella said, sounding amused. “So let’s get going, or we’ll find out the hard way how off our simulations were with the times.”

Prodded towards the stairwell by his second in command, Paxton grumbled as he took the stairs two at a time. “Is it Brother Dear or Sister Dear?” he called over his shoulder.

“It’s Brother Dear, of course.” He could almost feel the wicked smile on her face as if it was his own. “Sister Dear was needed for the treasury.”

He nodded sagely, coming out onto a landing well lit with the warm Alderaanian sunshine spilling through the wide glass windows that overlooked a delightful little plaza with a bubbling fountain. Typical sort of Alderaanian architecture and design, all aesthetic with no real thought into defenses or even seasonal appropriateness. The elegance of the view and all was somewhat marred by the still smoking rubble lying about in haphazard piles, and the occasional body lying ragdolled on the ground. There was a long line of guards kneeling along the far wall of the lobby, their hands bound behind their backs and their mouths covered with some kind of adhesive. Several crew of the Obsidian Vulture were standing guard over them, their blaster rifles held at the ready.

“Oh, my dear lovely crew, it warms the cockles of my heart to see you, it does,” he called merrily, tipping a jaunting salute in the direction of one of the Alderaanians who glared over their shoulder at him. “Can someone please give me a status update, and some clothing.”

Mauler- he assumed it to be Brother Dear, given Bloodhound’s earlier words- jogged over to him with a tote bag, his boots and helmet sticking out the top of the zipper. He dropped it on the ground at his feet wordlessly, bowing his head respectfully as he did so. “It is good to see you again, my Captain,” Mauler said in a quiet voice, so at odds with the snarling crudity of his sister.

Bloodhound had a hand up to the earpiece clipped tightly around her montrals, a look of concentration on her face. “The Treasury Team have breached the primary and secondary defenses,” she said loudly. “They’re working on the vault doors now- but they said the emergency response team left four minutes ago, so we don’t have long.”

“Marvellous,” Paxton said, spinning in place slowly as he took in the details of the lobby. It was a grand old building, the Guard of Aldera, and it was a shame to see it damaged- but, as he’d said to poor Warden Brell, this wasn’t the first time Alderaan had been subjected to violence, and it wouldn’t be the last. It would survive a few overenthusiastic scratches from a gang of rowdy pirates. Finally spotting a security cam on the far wall, Paxton dragged the tote bag behind him as he stalked over to it, stopping in an open section of the floor so that the camera had full view of him as he stripped down to nothing more than his underwear.

He hummed as he worked, dropping the drab prison garb on the floor as he traded it for his far more iconic leathers, sighing happily at the comfort of familiar clothing as he tugged his pants up around his waist.

From behind him, he heard a cough. “You know, there are easier ways to get a girl to like you,” Bella said bluntly.

Halfway through fastening his belt, Paxton snorted. “I beg your pardon?” he said, not looking up.

“You heard me, Rall. I seem to find just asking them out for drinks works wonders.”

He had to decide between the shirt and the boots, and he settled on the boots; if that meant he was shirtless in front of the security cam for a little longer, well, that was hardly his fault, was it? Boots were more practical, if they needed to make a fast getaway. “I would be delighted to ask a beautiful woman out for a drink, if there were such a woman I had my eye on,” he said, tugging one on and then the other, hopping awkwardly in place so as not to topple over while he did so. Satisfied with that, he straightened quickly, running his hands over his lekku as he did so, as a human might push back their hair. He kept the pose for a moment, bare-chested with his hands on his head, and then reached for his shirt and coat.

When he glanced over at Bloodhound, she rolled her eyes. “You are genuinely insufferable, you know that?” she said.

“You love me, darling,” he cooed, but her lip didn’t even twitch with a smile.

“Why are you so interested in a damned cop, anyway?” she asked. From outside came the sound of sirens, growing louder with every passing second. “I’m pretty sure shooting up her hometown and killing a couple of soldiers isn’t going to endear you to her.”

He waved a hand dismissively as he pulled his shirt on over his head, tugging his lekku through the neck. “You are imagining things, my darling Bella,” he said, shrugging into his coat. The leather settled around him in a way that made him want to purr, and patted his hands down the front of his ensemble to make sure his assorted blasters and knives were all accounted for and not trapped in an evidence locker.

From over by the door, Xuan and another one of the crew were keeping watch for the inevitable onslaught of guards coming to rescue their fallen comrades. “Incoming!” Xuan yelled suddenly, lurching back from his position as the doors boomed from a powerful impact.

“Everyone head for the roof,” Bella called, cool as a cucumber while she counted heads as the rest of the crew sprinted past her. Zhiva, Boskalla, come on! Up up, let’s go!”

Paxton surveyed the lobby one last time, watching the door thud with each successive impact as the poor souls tried to break past their own defences. He had his helmet tucked under his arm, so his face was clear of obstruction as he finished his turn and found himself facing the security cam again.

He grinned.

He waved coyly.

And he blew a kiss towards the lens.

Then he pulled his helmet on, shaking his lekku until it sat snugly, and ran up the stairs to wait for Mad Jehni and Friendly Rin to extract them from the roof.

* * *

_A week or so later..._

Mek-Sha wasn’t particularly high on Thiare’s list of favourite places to visit, but it wasn’t the worst, either. Granted, the peculiar gravitational effects of being inside a planetary body, instead of on the outside, were hard to explain to people who hadn’t experienced it first hand; it was easier to cope with when you were indoors, but when you were outside on the street, and you could look up and see more streets above you, on the far side of the habited ring? It was vaguely nauseating.

Also, the rampant crime and corruption that plagued the asteroid port? Not a fan. Not a fan at all.

But, she was back in the field. Back doing her job properly, like she should’ve been doing all along until some jackass pirate had decided to upend her entire career progression to date. It felt good to be out in familiar haunts like this, because it helped to take her mind off of so many things. Her frustration with the state of the war, for example, and the weirdly sick sensation she got whenever she had to go over reports about Ziost; she didn’t want to feel sympathy for the Imps, or humanise them in any way, but that sort of tragedy wasn’t something you could just... look away from. And she hated that she thought that was an option, she hated that a part of her just wanted to not care about all of the children and the elderly and the slaves who would’ve been killed in the cataclysm.

She didn’t want to care about Imps, though.

It was a decent enough moral quandary to keep her distracted from thoughts of Rall, for the most part, so she accepted it. Better to agonise over the ethical implications of Ziost than think about him for even a second more.

It was a cold night as she made her way from the cheap bedsit she’d taken up residence in for her stay, over to one of the vaguely more reputable cantinas on the west side. Mek-Sha had been a mining town once upon a time, before the Hutts had mined it down to naught but a shell, and it still bore all the traces of being a mining town. More refugees, though, people fleeing in every direction and trying to keep off of someone’s radar.

That seemed to be the way of the world, these days. Too many refugees, no safe places left in the stars. Too much violence, too much greed.

Ugh, she was making herself angry and she’d barely been back on the job a day.

She pulled her long leather coat around her tightly, trying to keep the cold at bay as she kept her head down, marching sharply down the boulevards and avoiding the alleyways. Her destination was likely to get more rowdy as the evening wore on, but hopefully at this hour it would still be tolerable for her investigations.

A couple of scantily clad women of various species called out to her from the doorway of a dance club, with several more dancing provocatively in the window booths. She waved them away with an awkward smile, hoping the red in her cheeks would be taken for the cold.

The cantina had a flashing neon sign out the front to draw interest from passersby, a large misshapen worm flailing about over the words _Worm Rock Cafe_ ; she shuddered as she looked away from it. Hopefully the asteroid was a little too busy these days for those sorts of critters to get a good foothold.

To her dismay, there was a large plastic version hanging from the ceiling as she walked in, toothy maw agape as if it was in the process of soaring through the air towards her to attack. She pulled a face at it, and a patron at a nearby table cackled quietly, grinning into his drink when she glared at him.

The bar wasn’t full yet, so it was easy enough to navigate her way through the tables and up to the bar proper; she snagged a stool on the far end, gesturing for the bartender as she did so. “Grab a beer?” she said.

A bottle slid towards her a few seconds later. “Eleven credits,” he rumbled.

She did her best not to pull another face. “Didn’t know the robbery here took place in an official capacity too,” she said. He stared flatly at her, and she grudgingly fished out her credit chip from her pocket.

The music was loud, but not unbearably so; she’d rather go without her implants, but she needed every advantage available to her when working the field, so she’d just have to take some pain relief stims later tonight to deal with the headache. Or, she thought sourly as she took a sip of the drink before her, to help her deal with a hangover. The beer was so sharp with the taste of ethanol that she probably could’ve easily cleaned a speeder engine with it, no problem. Not that she’d been expecting quality food and drink in a place like this, but she was hoping for something a little more tolerable than a flavourless swill that tasted like it’d been brewed in the refresher.

She definitely wasn’t going to buy food here. It’d be violently expensive and cold in the middle, knowing her luck. She’d seen some street food carts on her walk over from the bedsit, so maybe she’d get lucky and find someone making decent tacos.

She kept an eye on the door for the next twenty minutes or so, nursing her beer slowly. She could already feel it going to her head, her fault for not eating first, and she really didn’t want to order another one when her contact got her to justify taking up space at the bar. When a striking woman with a dark bob haircut and equally dark eyeliner swanned in the door a little while later, Thiare had just about been ready to risk sending a message to ask if the meeting was still happening. The woman paused in the doorway to the bar for a moment, the elaborate fur ruff on her coat almost drowning her chin as she surveyed the room; Thiare wearily raised a hand and waved half-heartedly, and the woman just about jumped happily on the spot.

“Thiare!” she called, or at least that’s what Thiare assumed she said; the bar was a little rowdier now than when she’d entered, and it was harder for her to process individual sounds and voices. Certainly, she recognised the shape of her name on someone’s lips when they said it, so she smiled as she made her way towards her.

“Casey,” she said in greeting, kissing her on the cheek as she reached her. “You look a little too fancy for a place like this.”

Casey Rix preened, fluffing up the edges of the ruff as if she was petting an animal. “Isn’t it just darling?” she said, beaming happily. “I got passed over for a promotion, so I gutted the bastard who bad mouthed me and stole the job from me, and then I emptied his bank accounts.”

Thiare had no real response to that sort of admission that wouldn’t lose her a valuable underworld contact, so she just pressed her lips together in an awkward approximation of a smile; she didn’t need a mirror to know it came off more as a grimace, “The joys of working in a field with no human resources department, I suppose,” she said.

“Ugh, you’re telling me.” Casey slid gracefully into the seat beside her, and Thiare climbed back onto her own stool and pulled her disgusting beer close to her. “Next time, we should absolutely do a spa session. Manicures, at the very least.”

“We aren’t friends, Rix,” she said.

Casey cuffed her gently on the shoulder. “Nonsense,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t give away Exchange secrets to just any old agent who comes knocking, after all.”

It was too loud for her not to face her, so she grudgingly turned on the stool until she could watch Casey’s face as they talked. “You said you wanted to talk,” she started to say, but Casey interrupted her excitedly.

“Oh, oh! I need to show you!” She dug around in her pocket for a moment and pulled out a datapad, flicking through quickly. “I am an auntie,” she crowed triumphantly, holding out the datapad with a picture of a dark-skinned infant on the screen. “They even named him after me!”

This, at least, was something she had plenty of experience with. As the second youngest of seven, she already had a multitude of nieces, nephews and niblings of unspecified gender that she admittedly never saw regularly enough. “Congratulations,” she said, smiling with a little more genuine warmth. “I haven’t heard you talk about your siblings before.”

Casey waved a hand, as if dismissing the thought. “Nah, it’s my ex’s kid,” she said blithely. “I’m sure I mentioned him before, Nikki?”

“How could I forget, your dealings with the infamous pirate captain Andronikos Revel,” Thiare said, her mood souring slightly.

She nudged her. “Why you gotta say it like that?” she asked. “Can’t you turn off that work brain for two minutes?”

She risked taking a drink of the poor excuse for beer. “Let’s just say I’m not really fond of pirates at the moment,” she said, feeling her pocket vibrate with an incoming message.

“Pfft, I hear you. Pirates are the worst for dating, honestly. If I hadn’t seen Nikki and Bejah together with my own two eyes, I never would’ve believed it- never date a pirate, Thiare.”

“That’s really not ever going to be an issue.”

Thiare watched her as she flagged down the bartender and ordered her own drink, some elaborate cocktail that seemed to bear some resemblance to a cherry sour, but with far too many extra steps and ingredients. She took the momentary distraction as an opportunity to check her commlink, glancing at it under the bar- and her blood ran cold. She didn’t even need to open the message in full, because the title scrolling across her feed was enough to set her teetering between rage and horror.

_Paxton Rall escaped custody._

Casey spun back to her, and Thiare did her best to hide the screen before she could see it; she mustn’t have hid her reaction all that well, though, because a look of concern flickered over Casey’s face. “Y’all good, sugar?” she said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Pocketing the commlink for future perusal, she smiled thinly. “All good,” she said, unconvincingly. “Just... work.”

She nodded sympathetically. “Well, you know my suggestions- gut them, steal their money, and pamper yourself.”

“Not really relevant to this particular situation, but thank you.” She sat forward, clearing her throat and trying desperately to put Paxton Rall out of her mind. “Now, I believe you said you might have something for me?”

Casey nodded, looking over her shoulder for a good once-over of the bar before turning back to her. “Yeah, so,” she said, leaning in close, “have you heard the word Zakuul before?”

That certainly helped to clear her mind. “I have,” she said carefully. “What do you know?”

“Not a lot, admittedly,” Casey said, throwing a sparkling smile at the bartender as he placed her drink in front of her. She fished out one of the cherries by the stem, dangling it almost provocatively over her lips before chomping down on it. “I don’t even know what it is- whether it’s a person, or a company, or a place-”

“That’s not exactly helpful, Rix.”

“Point is,” Casey continued, waggling the stem in her face before discarding it on the top of the bar, “whatever it is, it’s got the boys upstairs spooked as hell. Like, the orders we’re getting down from above? They’re running scared. I’ve been with the Exchange over five years now, and I ain’t never seen anything like it, not even the Dread Masters got ‘em this worked up, and they stole a good chunk of our ops in the top end of Hutt Space.”

Thiare breathed out slowly, taking the info in slowly and turning it over in her head. “Do you know what this Zakuul is doing that has them scared?” she asked.

Casey shook her head as she sipped her drink. “Nothing officially,” she said. “But I hear things. And I pay attention.”

“And?”

“And I’m getting to it,” she said, waving a hand in her face; Thiare gritted her teeth in frustration, fighting the urge to point out that that was the equivalent of shouting in her face. “Sheesh, let a girl enjoy a drink why don’t you.”

Thiare merely bit the inside of her cheek and stared at her.

Casey rolled her eyes as she drank. “Ugh, you’re insufferable,” she said, smacking her lips as she set it back down on the bar. “But you can’t do anything that traces this back to me, yeah?”

“I’m familiar with your demands, Rix,” she said impatiently. “Just as I’ll remind you that the only reason I haven’t arrested you so far is that you’ve agreed to keep out of Republic space, and to not waste my time.”

Scrunching up her nose in displeasure, Casey sighed. “You really are no fun,” she grumbled. “So, the Exchange has a big presence out in the Anoat Sector. Gerrenthum, Bespin-”

“I know the area,” she said. “I thought that was White Maw territory, what with Hoth and everything.”

Casey sniffed. “The White Maw are simple pirates,” she said loftily. “The Exchange is a _business_ syndicate-”

“A _criminal_ business syndicate.”

“And we have no _interest_ in running around the frozen wastes of a wretched planet for a bit of scrap metal,” she finished. “We have far more _sophisticated_ operations in place.”

“Any you care to share with me?”

“ _No_.” She paused. “Not much point, really. We’ve just about pulled out of the region entirely. Whatever- or whoever- Zakuul is, it’s in Wild Space, and it’s coming our way in a manner that got the Exchange all shook up.”

Thiare considered her words, trying to comprehend something that could send the Exchange screaming to a dead halt. They were criminals, gun-runners, war profiteers- if Zakuul was some kind of enemy, there was profit to be had in their emergence onto the galactic stage. What exactly was Zakuul if it could pry the Exchange away from the promise of credits?

She huffed out a breath. “Okay. Thanks, Casey.”

Rix preened happily. “Any time, sugar,” she said. “And call me when you wanna go get those manicures done, m’kay?”

Patting her on the shoulder, Thiare stood up from her stool. “Not gonna happen, Rix,” she said. “Stay out of trouble.”

“Not gonna happen,” she parroted back at her, with a cheeky wink.

She grimaced. “Well... thanks. Enjoy, uh. Enjoy crime, I guess.”

“You know I will!”

The temperature had dropped further when she made her way outside, her breath steaming in front of her as she walked down the metal plate roadways of the colony. Despite the cold and the late hour, the streets were busy as ever, and it was relatively crowded as she ducked and dodged through the larger groups of pedestrians. There were plenty of people who looked far too hungry and far too cold, and her heart ached for all of them desperately; so many of them came to places like this, places like Mek-Sha with limited legal process and next to no border control, because of the lure of easy money with the criminal syndicates. When you were homeless and starving, expelled from your home by an unending war, the offer of a warm bed and a hot meal in exchange for your soul must have been a sorely tempting promise.

She hated how organisations like the Exchange and the Black Suns preyed upon the desperate. Almost as much as she hated how much the Empire put them in that position in the first place.

Her pocket buzzed again, and she ducked into a side alley to fish out her datapad, stamping her feet on the spot to try and encourage warmth into her toes. The air was cold enough that it made the inside of her nose ache, and the alley smelled sour in a way that could have been from rotting garbage or could have been from less savoury things. She shouldn’t have had that beer, even if she hadn’t finished it; her head felt a little buzzy, and she was just the tiniest bit dizzy.

_Paxton Rall escaped custody_. Even the title of the message was enough to make her seethe- how dare he treat the legal system so flippantly, as if his arrest was nothing more than a joke! She skimmed through the report, feeling sick to her stomach as she saw the damage report, and the death count. She put a hand to the wall of the alley to steady herself, feeling a white hot rage building inside of her. It grew almost cataclysmically when she read further, seeing the news of the simultaneously raid on the Treasury building; the breakout had coincided with a very brief window where the Treasury had been holding a large collection of artworks in storage, and they were all gone. All plundered by those vile pirates and their arrogant bastard of a captain, who probably had nothing better to do than to use them for target practice.

She slammed her fist against the wall, feeling the sharp crack of pain across her knuckles; it did nothing to clear the haze of anger and righteous fury she felt within.

_Your job is not Paxton Rall_ , she told herself, even though she wasn’t really listening. _You are an agent for the Strategic Information Service. Your job is to monitor and minimise the danger posed by criminal organisations in Republic space. Your job is not to kill a fucking pirate._

She scrolled to the bottom of the report, letting out a strangled sound when she saw the image files attached. Images of Paxton mostly naked, posed directly before the security camera. Images of him blowing kisses to the camera.

She was so angry she was shaking. She liked to think that she had a fair amount of tolerance for shenanigans, and that she was the sort who could enjoy a good joke, but this? This went beyond the pale.

And what was the point of even attaching those images to the report, anyway? Surely better to include footage from the vault breach, or the insurance files on the stolen artwork? Far easier for a recovery team to recover them if they knew what they were looking for in the first place. No ballistics report, no crime scene analysis, no-

No name at the bottom of the report.

She breathed out sharply through her nose, and scrolled quickly back up to the top. The domain that had sent the report was encrypted, but it didn’t look out of place amongst the rest of the files and correspondence she received from headquarters. With shaking fingers, she dragged the domain into another tab, and ran it through a trace.

A few moments later, it pinged- and the result was not for the Heorem Complex on Coruscant.

It was a wonder that flames weren’t dripping off of her skin, so violent was the rage inside of her. _I’m going to fucking kill you,_ she typed, then hit send.

She didn’t have to wait long for a response. _You have to catch me first, sweetheart- and you weren’t so good at that the first two times around._

Thiare pressed her clenched fist up to her mouth, muffling the snarled scream that she tried to hold in. She stalked back and forth in the confined space of the alleyway, typing out a response with sharp, jerky clicks. _I am going to find you, and when I do, you are going to wish to every god drifting among the stars that you had stayed in that fucking cell where I left you._

_So poetic, love! You’ve really got a way with words. Have you ever considered poetry as a career?_

She nearly threw her datapad against the far wall, stifling another scream from between clenched teeth. It beeped again in her hand, another message coming through before she could even respond to the last.

_Did you even stop to look at what we liberated from your incorruptible guardsmen? Too busy being insensible with rage at my refusal to deal with your archaic and bigoted legal system?_

She snarled. _I don’t need to justify any of my actions to you, and I'm not interested in whatever excuses you think validates your violence and your greed._

_Clearly. The art was stolen. Not recently, mind- unless you count my courageous rescue as stealing- but it was all lifted by some rather enterprising artisans about ten years back who thought to make a pretty penny off the labour of others. Seems par the course for Alderaanians, mind you. They love their art and their culture and their delicate sensibilities, but they're not so fond of acknowledging the people who create the art, especially not if they're not human or rich or attractive. You know how it goes._

Thiare stared at the screen, indescribably angry and far too incensed to try and make sense of his nonsense. _What are you talking about?_

_Oh, and here I thought you liked big fancy words, sorry love, lemme dumb it down for you- Alderaanian leeches stole art from poor sad aliens. Pretended art was theirs. Big bad and big sad. Me take art and give back to sad poor aliens. Big happy!_

_I cannot even begin to describe how much I hate you. I cannot believe you would make up these nerfshit lies. How stupid do you think I am?_

_Sorry, love, should I have written it like a poem? There was some colonialist scum, Who stole-_

She screamed, the sound animalistic and feral, and hurled her datapad against the wall. It smashed with a crackle of sparks, falling to the filthy ground, and she drove her boot down on top of it hard. She stomped over and over again, until it stopped sparking, until it was just a shattered mess of broken wires and shattered plastic strewn over the alleyway.

Breathing heavily, her fists clenched at her sides, Thiare fought to gain control of her temper. Paxton Rall was not her mission. Paxton Rall was not her focus.

Paxton Rall was not worth her time.

She had to work out what a Zakuul was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> None of you should be surprised about the fact that I'm thirsty for twi'leks but here we are. Paxton gets to be a sultry tart to satiate my thirst


	5. Chapter 5

Thiare had never been to Hoth before, but she’d heard the stories- endless kilometres of untouched ice, so bright it burned your eyes and left your skin red and peeling, roaring winds that could rage for weeks at a time, sending the temperature plummeting and burying any ground level fortifications in literal metres of snow. Cloudless nights so cold that the metal plating on the Republic bases buckled and shattered, cold so intense that there were stories of sentries freezing to death where they stood, so paralyzed and sluggish from exposure to the extreme temperature that they couldn’t even rouse themselves enough to flee for help.

It was dangerous enough for most people, but for those with implants and prosthetics? An aid that was supposed to make their lives so much easier was suddenly a desperate liability, absorbing the cold and burning them with frost from the inside out. She’d had experience with it as a child on Alderaan, the astounding headaches she’d struggled through whenever she’d been careless during an outing to the snowfields and gotten snow under her beanie. It always frustrated her, watching her siblings frolic and play and smash snowballs over one another’s heads, while she was confined indoors with a raging headache and a scolding.

She’d just wanted to have fun, like the rest of them- but fun was dangerous, and she needed to be sensible. She’d learned the hard way that the alternative was always painful.

Even so, as thoroughly prepared as she was for Hoth, the cold was utterly breathtaking. It was a sunny day as she set out from Aurek Base, something she was told was a rarity in this season; she had a full set of thermal-regulating body armour, including an enclosed helmet, making her feel like she was staggering around on the surface in a spacesuit. The cheerful holographic readout on the inside of the helmet informed her that the outside temperature was currently sitting at negative thirty-one degrees standard, and that her exposure to such temperatures needed to be limited to under three hours even with the aid of the bodysuit.

She’d be cutting it fine, but hopefully her destination had sufficient insulation and heating that she’d get a reprieve in the middle of her journey. If not, well... she’d figure something out.

She nodded to the sentries strolling up and down the fenced edge of the base, taking note of how thick the layers of their armour was, how they all carried emergency supply packs on their backs in case the unthinkable happened and they were stranded without shelter. The supply packs had become standard issue in the last five or six years, ever since there’d been an Imperial attempt to collapse Aurek base a while back, and drive the unprepared crew and administrators out into the snow to die of exposure. If you were on Hoth, you had to have a pack within reach at all times.

Her own pack thumped against her back as she walked, far too conspicuous for her liking, but she couldn’t argue with the logic. She could already feel her fingers and toes aching a little, and there was a slight pain in her temples near to where her implants sat.

A few hours, and this would be over and done with. She’d had worse assignments.

Transport between the outposts was by Republic approved speeders only, hardy machines designed to weather the extreme cold without their batteries draining in seconds. She held up her authorisation chips as she approached, and one of the guards came over to greet her. They didn’t exchange any words- talking expended energy that could desperately be used elsewhere, and wasn’t that just a metaphor for her life in general- but the guard scanned her chips and then led her to one of the parked speeders. Unplugging it from where it was idling, they gently guided it over to where she stood, holding it in place while she mounted. She gave them a thumbs up, and they stepped back as she gunned the engine.

A spray of snow kicked up behind her as she took off across the Whiterock Wastes, the vast plains stretching out before her towards the distant mountain ridges. And stars, it was _bright_ ; even with the glare minimising tint to her helmet she had to squint to keep her eyes from watering.

There was an outpost at the northern tail of Highmount Ridge, a bare-bones operation that went by the name of Onith that serviced the geothermal substations in the area. She couldn’t understand why harnessing the heat of the undersea vents didn’t translate into warmer interiors, but she was hoping not to be here long enough to need to complain; anyway, complaining was probably all anyone did around here. She’d certainly heard her fair share of it in the halls of the administration centre in Aurek.

It took her just under an hour to get to Onith, and from there she switched to a fresh speeder to continue her journey into the narrow valley wedged in between the spurs of the mountain range. Her destination was an infamous pleasure den- if anyone was capable of finding pleasure on a planet this fucking cold-, buried in the underbelly of a glacier that ran into the valley. A White Maw pleasure den, to be precise, currently under the control of the ominously named Crimson Wings, allegedly for the frozen slashes of colour left behind in the snow when they left their victims to bleed out through the holes in their protective armour. It was certainly a colourful nom de guerre, but hardly creative as far as these things went. Criminals were a tediously predictive lot.

Still. She had no desire to learn first-hand whether the name was well-earned or not.

The entrance to the chasm wasn’t marked, and she almost missed it in the vast expanse of blinding white; it was only because a tauntaun stuck its head out from behind a snowbank where the road dropped away sharply that she even spotted it at all. She slowed down sharply, angling around the beast as it snorted, steam billowing from its nostrils in the sharp cold.

The temperature dropped instantly once she was out of reach of the sun, and there was a warning flash from the sensors inside her helmet as it revised her energy stores in the face of the heavier demand on the armour’s heating capabilities.The walls of the chasm were a deep, intricate blue, far more breath-taking than she’d ever seen the sky capable of. The pathway was well worn, evidence of frequent traffic, but other than that, there was still no sign of life- no signposts, no warnings, no-

She slammed on the brakes, and the speeder skidded sideways to a halt, kicking up a spray of snow in front of it. There was a small circular shape flashing on the snow on the inside of her visor, pulsing an angry warning red; she tossed a sensor probe ahead of her, the small globe winking with an array of lights as it caught itself in mid-air and settled about three feet above the ground, whirring quietly as it scanned the narrow passage of the glacial canyon. Three more red circles appeared in her vision, three more proximity mines to worry about, and she grimaced; obviously the White Maw had other entrances down to the base, because they wouldn’t have been so careless as to rig such a deadly trap in a place where they could very easily kill their own members.

If she was careful, she could navigate through them- but that was assuming they hadn’t rigged other surprises that her scanner hadn’t picked up. With a grunt of annoyance, she kicked the speeder into park, leaving it idling behind an outcropping of rock; hopefully nobody was in the market for a new speeder, because she wouldn’t make it back to safety before nightfall without it. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a set of crampons, strapping them on tightly over her boots; satisfied with her preparations, she aimed her grappling gun to a spot on the wall far ahead of the mines and fired, watching the gas-propelled spike fly through the air and embed itself into the ice. Tugging on it once or twice to check that it was firmly secured, she clipped the safety wire around her belt and clicked recoil.

She flew through the air at a sickening speed, soaring over the top of the mines and hurtling towards the wall of solid ice. She twisted and got her legs up in front of her, knees bent and tucked towards her stomach as she prepared for the impact.

She hit hard, the impact jarring up through her knees badly and making her teeth rattle in her skull, but she held her posture and got the crampons hooked into the ice so that she didn’t go bouncing off to hit again. After a moment of hanging awkwardly from the wall of an ice chasm like an idiot, the pain faded, and once she’d caught her breath, she slowly rappelled down to the ground again. A quick scan of the area revealed that she’d hopefully bypassed all of the mines, and a spike of heat on her periphery indicated that the entrance to the underground lair was just up ahead.

There was a heavy duty metal arch up ahead, the sort that most of the facilities on this worthless hunk of ice seemed to feature; it had lights built into the frame, and some of the most powerful blast doors short of the Emperor’s palace itself, in a vain attempt to keep the unending cold at bay. For a pleasure den, there was a surprising lack of anything to indicate that pleasure could be found within, and for a moment she felt a surge of uneasiness, wondering if her sources were out of date. But as she drew closer, she spotted a pair of guards huddled over a burning metal bin, the flames pitifully insufficient compared to the cold; they glanced at her as she approached, their expressions unreadable under the helmets, but she could practically feel the suspicion bleeding off of them.

“Hold up,” one of them called, gesturing for her to come closer. Both of them very pointedly put their hands on their guns. “State your business.”

She kept her hands clear of her own guns- she wasn’t an idiot, and walking into a place like this unarmed was practically painting a target on her back- and kept her distance as she answered. “Thought this was a pleasure den,” she called back. “Looking for pleasure.”

They glanced at each other, and when the first one answered, his tone was distinctly more interested now that he’d heard a female voice coming from her helmet. “Don’t need to go far for that, sweetheart,” he said, the audio aid in her comms running a translation of the words across the bottom of her visor. She almost wished it wouldn’t at times like this. “We can help right here.”

The other one laughed, and she was glad they couldn’t see her roll her eyes. “As tempting as that offer is, I’ve got something else in mind boys.” She pulled a credit bag from her belt and drew out two small ingots of aurodium, no larger than her pinky finger, both stamped with the treasury seal of Alderaan. She tossed them towards them, and as they examined them carefully, she said “I’m looking to buy something on behalf of my boss. Heard the Wings were the people to speak to.”

After a moment of painful silence, they finally stepped to the side and let her enter; she nodded her thanks to them, and tried to ignore the way their eyes followed her into the den of iniquity. She normally didn’t mind the silence, but that was when she had facial expressions and body language to work with. In the heavy gear necessary to survive on Hoth, she was all but blind as well as deaf.

The crampons on her feet crunched loudly on the metal grating on the descending ramp, but she didn’t stop to remove them. She’d grown up in the snow on Alderaan, and was well accustomed to walking in awkward snow gear- and if she had to leave in a hurry, she wouldn’t have time to reattach them to get back over the minefield again. As she descended into the ice, it grew darker and colder, to the point where she could feel the weight of the cold pressing onto her skin through her thermal armour. She wanted to rub her arms, but she also didn’t want to look weak.

No idea who was watching, after all.

She rounded a corner and found herself in what she assumed was the main room, a vaguely circular chamber that was about as wide across as a standard spaceport hangar bay; the only lights were the brightly coloured sort you’d more likely expect to see in a Nar Shaddaa casino, slowly pulsing through a rainbow of colours that rippled against the icy roof. There was a bar, manned by what had to be the sturdiest coldweather droid in the Outer Rim, a wall of bottled alcohol glinting in the low light behind it. There were heaters everywhere, red bars glowing like demon eyes, but even so, the temperature was only mildly more tolerable than outside; the gauge in her armour fluctuated as she walked around the perimetre of the room, going as high as five under at one point.

The chamber wasn’t crowded, but it certainly wasn’t empty either. There were several Wings’ members over by the bar, hooting and yelling in the manner that most violent drunks seemed to reach sooner rather than later. Their helmets were off, steam billowing from their mouths as they set the tops of their drinks on fire before blowing them out just as quickly and downing it in one gulp. There were a handful dancing on what passed for a dancefloor, and about twice as many slouched in couches around the room. Some of them were gambling, throwing dice across the tables between them. Too many of them watched her as she wandered through the room.

Someone stepped directly in front of her, and she nearly staggered to stop herself from walking right into them. She looked up, and up, into the face of a cyborg at least a foot taller than she was, his eyes replaced with metal spheres that clicked and whirred as he looked down at her. “This is a private establishment,” he said, crossing his meaty arms over his chest.

She held her ground. “I paid the door charge,” she said, not missing a beat.

“So I’ve heard,” he said, his voice a low growl. “Unfortunately, the fee just went up.”

“Are you this hostile to all of your potential business partners?”

He sneered at her. “You’ve come a long way just to do business with scavengers, little girl,” he growled. “Doesn’t seem like a financially prudent choice, and I don’t know if we want to do business with someone without a lick of sense for money.”

She squared her shoulders. “Why don’t you let your boss be the judge of that?” she said boldly. “Unless you want to explain to her how you lost such a lucrative client...?”

He stepped closer, looming right over her. “And what’s to stop me from killing you right here and taking all of your lucrative capital off of your cooling body?”

“Jago.”

A woman’s voice cut across the chamber, cold and whip-sharp; everyone turned towards the sound, including the man in front of her, who was presumably Jago. There was a door on the far end of the ice, and from the room within stepped another extraordinarily tall individual. Her skin was green, and her face was sharp and angular; her hair was jet black, and grew so far back from her forehead that from some angles she looked bald. What hair she did have was tied back in a high knot, the tresses falling down almost to her mid back.

Her armour was stark white, except for a splash of red across the chest that seemed vaguely to imitate the shape of wings.

“Bring her,” she said, hand on a hip as she gestured for them to join her in the room.

Jago grunted and went to grab her by the arm; Thiare slapped his hand away. “I can walk just fine by myself, thanks,” she said.

The woman by the door didn’t move as she approached, hand still planted firmly on her hip as she watched her. Her eyes were bright yellow, almost glowing in the dim light, and as she passed her into the room, Thiare’s sensors silently issued a warning that the woman was putting out pheromones. Her helmet’s filters could protect her for now, but they’d expect her to remove her helmet in a private conference.

She could hear them following her into the room, and she knew she only had seconds to act.

 _Activate neural stim_ , she commanded silently, knowing the network connected through her implants would recognise the thought. There was a prick at the back of her neck, and an almost instantaneous burst of awareness flooded through her, as if she’d drunk a dozen cups of caf back to back.

Hopefully neither of them would look close enough to see her undoubtedly huge eyes.

The door hissed shut behind them, and the woman leaned up against a nearby desk while Jago held position by the door. She crossed her arms and cocked her head to the side. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice thickly accented.

 _Here goes nothing_. She reached up and unhooked her helmet, biting back the gasp of shock as the cold rushed in against her skin; it hurt so badly that it prickled, like a thousand tiny needles stabbing at her over and over, but she bit her lip and tried to ignore it. She couldn’t afford to appear weak. “My name isn’t important,” she said, tucking her helmet against her side. “I represent a very powerful man who is interested in a collaboration-”

“A name,” the woman snapped. “Yours or his, I do not care, but I will not deal with the nameless.”

Thiare smiled flatly, a gesture that was not at all friendly. “You may call me Lady Stoha,” she said, “and I serve as a member of the Obsidian Vulture, the flagship of his eminence, Captain Paxton Rall.”

Did she feel a bitter sense of triumph using his own terrible alias against him? Most certainly. But if all went according to plan, he hopefully wouldn’t ever be in a position to find out about it. She’d done her best to put Rall out of her head these last few weeks, to no avail. The bastard always lingered, always with a cocky smile and wink, always with a smarmy quip that was undoubtedly supposed to make him look infinitely clever and witty and instead just made her want to screech; she’d be a liar if she said she hadn’t looked at the footage of him stripping off in the middle of the Guard of Aldera lobby far too many times, and she hated herself for it.

So he was a flirt, so what? It didn’t mean anything. He was just trying to get under her skin. The best response was to not let him.

An even better response was to make him pay for ever flirtation and coy smile.

The falleen woman kept her head cocked to the side. “I know of Captain Rall,” she said, with a vague nod of acknowledgement. “He has never given the White Maw cause to quarrell.”

Thiare inclined her head respectfully. “And he has no reason to start,” she said. “My captain has nothing but the utmost respect for the White Maw territories.”

“My contacts tell me that you arrived on a Republic ship,” she said, her expression stony. “Does Captain Rall claim friends amongst the Pubs?”

Even the mere suggestion that she and Paxton Rall might be considered friends was enough to boil her blood; it didn’t matter that that wasn’t the perspective the woman was looking at the situation from, her reaction was immediate. Her expression must have shown her true feelings on the matter, because the woman laughed. “Do not worry, there is no love for the Republic in these parts,” she said. “Captain Rall must have spared no expense to procure a surface pass for you. The Republic are incredibly leery of who they allow access to Hoth’s treasures.”

Sometimes the truth was the easiest lie. “SIS identification is easy enough to forge,” she said, maintaining a straight face once more.

The woman barked out a laugh. “Is that not the truth,” she said, in a manner that made Thiare want to squint her eyes suspiciously at her. Exactly how much ID theft was going on out here? Her ongoing mission was always the Exchange, but since the Exchange were withdrawing from this region of space and leaving the White Maw free reign... maybe that meant someone needed to keep an eye on things. She made a mental note to include it in her report when she returned to her bunk on the supply carrier that had ferried her out here.

She felt abruptly dizzy, and knew that the pheromones were warring with the adrenal in her bloodstream. She hid a grimace in a thin smile, coughing into her hand to when her breathing grew shaky. “Are such acts of aggression necessary?” she said, a rasp in her voice. The falleen woman was watching her closely. “I have done nothing to warrant your hostility.”

“And you have done nothing to earn my respect,” she countered, but the intense light-headedness passed after a moment. She’d had the standard training in resisting the powerful psychic thrall of species like Falleen and Zeltron, but somehow in the heat of the moment, the training always seemed lacklustre in the face of the real thing. Right now, she felt like she hadn’t eaten in days, and she sorely wanted to sit down before her shaking knees gave out beneath her. “What does your Captain hope to gain by dealing with the White Maw?”

Thiare swallowed, trying to get her balance again as the pheromones receded. “Not the White Maw,” she said, unhooking the credit purse from her hip and tossing it towards her. The woman caught it without breaking eye contact. “Captain Rall hopes to do business with the Crimson Wings directly.”

At this, the woman paused, tugging open the tie on the purse as she considered the words silently; the aurodium ingots clacked together almost melodically as she stirred her bare fingers through them, as if searching for falsehoods or fake coins. As she did, the potent neurotoxin white fieljine that was painted in a thin layer over every ingot began to seep into her skin. Miraculously impotent when it came into contact with literally any other species in the galaxy, white fieljine specifically incapacitated falleen individuals. The guards by the door who had already taken her bribe would be fine.

Their commander? Not so much.

The large brute Jago was still going to be an issue, however.

Seemingly satisfied with what she saw in the purse, the woman nodded and set it down on the desk behind her. “Suppose I am interested in Captain Rall’s business,” she said carefully. “I would be a fool not to acknowledge what has become of my brethren these last five years, those captains and commanders who sought power from outside sources and paid the ultimate price for it. The White Maw is not a forgiving...” She paused. “Entity, I suppose. It is as cold and ruthless as Hoth herself. If I overextend myself and expose myself at a critical juncture, the Crimson Wings will fall as easily as the Scourge, or the Marauders, or so many others who came before us.”

Thiare managed a terse smile. “With all due respect, ma’am, perhaps you should hear out our proposal before jumping to conclusions?”

The woman fixed her with a flat stare. “I am not an idiot,” she said, “and this is not an insubstantial amount of money.”

“Captain Rall’s recent ventures on Alderaan were exceedingly profitable. He is nothing if not a generous man.”

“Captain Rall is an _unpredictable_ man,” she countered. “He makes no claims on territory, no attempts to establish a fleet. What could a man with no interest in power want with the gang that controls the stars west of the Corellian Trade Spire?”

The implant on her left side was beginning to struggle with the immense cold, even with the heaters in place in the room; the bone and tissue around it were aching, the pain sharp enough that it almost felt like burning. She couldn’t keep this up for more than another ten minutes, at most.

She smiled thinly. “I shall be blunt, then,” she said. “My captain would like to come to an arrangement regarding the distribution of lumni-spice. He has contacts, networks, all the necessary boltholes to smuggle the supply into Hutt Space and beyond-”

“That is a bold request, verging on insulting.”

Thiare held up her hands. “My dear captain means no disrespect,” she said smoothly, even though something inside of her hissed like a wet cat at the notion that Rall could be dear to anyone. “We simply thought, the opportunity presented itself, and none of us want to see the continued stranglehold the Exchange has on the underworld economy...”

For the first time, the woman’s expression flickered ever so slightly, a twitch in her eye that she hid by scowling. It could have been a tell, or it could have been the first sign that the poison was taking effect; either way, she silently celebrated it as a victory. “The Exchange is not so powerful as you would think,” she said cryptically; Thiare couldn’t be entirely sure if it was just the combination of her failing hearing aid and the thickness of the woman’s accent, but she might have slurred slightly. “There are those who even cause the Exchange to cower in their boots.”

She waited for her to continue, desperately hoping to hear the word ‘ _zakuul_ ’. She was so close to an answer, she could feel it. But the woman remained obstinately silent, and Thiare screamed internally. “Does the Exchange truly scare so easily, or is there some new threat we should be aware of?”

The commander watched her silently, and somehow the silence conveyed that at last, she had hit upon the truth of the matter.

She decided to press her luck.

“Does the name ‘ _zakuul_ ’ mean anything to you?” she asked, just as the woman put a hand up to her temple.

“What have you done to me?” she hissed, her other hand holding on to the desk for balance. There was a ragged edge to her breathing, some rattling harshly in her chest.

Fuck, she wasn’t supposed to have suspected her straight away. “What’s going on?” she asked, feigning distressed suspicion. “What do you mean, I haven’t done anything-”

“Jago,” the woman snarled hoarsely.

The crunch of the icy floor sounded as the goon took a step or two forward. “Boss?” he asked, blessedly confused by the abrupt turn of events.

The time for subtlety was over. She spun on her heel to face Jago, wide-eyed and panicked. “Is this some kind of trap?” she said, and she saw him hesitate ever so slightly in the face of her cutesy attempt at beguiling innocence. “Please, I’ve already given you all of my credits-”

“Jago!”

He glanced past her, to where his commander was now sliding awkwardly to the floor, the nerves in her legs having lost all feeling. It wasn’t a lethal dose, but she was certainly going to need quite a few days to recover. While the minion was distracted, Thiare lifted her arm- and shot a stun dart at the exposed gap between his armour and his chin. It was a hard shot, even at close range, but the stars were aligned in her favour and the drugged tip sank into the fleshy tissue of his neck.

He grunted in surprise, raising a hand jerkily as if to swat at it, like a bug. There was a moment or two where he wobbled on his feet, and Thiare panicked at the possibility that the drug couldn’t incapacitate a man his size; but then his cybernetic eyes abruptly shuttered, and he went slamming face first into the ground.

Thiare winced at the crunching noise he made as he landed, hoping that his nose hadn’t actually broken.

“You fucking bitch-” The words were cut off by a string of coughing, and Thiare turned to find the falleen woman sprawled across the ground, her face drooping as if she’d been drinking heavily for hours. “Gonna- gonna kill you... and captain-”

She didn’t know whether Jago had augments in place in his cybernetics that processed toxins for him, so she had no idea how long the stun dart was going to work in her favour. She marched over to the commander, who tried to bat her away rather weakly, but she ignored her attempts as she knelt beside her and firmly took her chin in her hand. “What is a ‘ _zakuul_ ’?” she repeated, far more directly this time.

The falleen woman tried to spit in her face, but her muscles wouldn’t cooperate; instead the spittle ran down her chin, freezing into an unpleasant icicle as it hung from her green skin. “May you burn... in a dry and- and darkless hell-”

“Spare me the curses, I just want information. What do you know about ‘zakuul’?”

She snarled at her. “Wait- another hour,” she slurred. “Then you’ll see.”

“Thank you, but I’m not waiting around for your friend to wake up.” Scowling, Thiare set her down carefully on her side, making sure she her head was balanced so that she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit should she succumb further to the poison. The cold was doing an excellent job of slowing down her own metabolic reaction to the toxin, so she might be lucky enough to avoid it altogether, but if not... well, Thiare didn’t need her dead. She’d rather prefer she lived.

She vaulted over the desk and made her way to the terminal behind it, pulling her dataspike from her satchel as she went; she stabbed it into the port and activated it, and tapped her fingers impatiently as she waited for it to break past the internal firewalls. Thankfully, she didn’t have to wait long, and after a moment she had full access to the commander’s private files.

Zakuul, Zakuul... there! She opened the files as she was copying them, scanning through them quickly. A planet... no, an empire? Made up of immortals? It sounded more like a bad fantasy holodrama, but it was likely some sort of encryption to deter prying eyes. An empire larger and more powerful than the Republic and the Sith put together? Well, if that wasn’t the most absurd fantasy she’d encountered since she’d last let her youngest brother convince her to play Rancors and Ruins with his friends.

Nevertheless, she couldn’t decrypt the data if she didn’t copy it to take with her, so she anxiously waited for the transfer to complete before tugging the spike from the port and securing it in her satchel again. She stopped in front of the commander, crouching down in front of her so she could make eye contact; she smirked, saluting briefly with two fingers. “Captain Rall sends his regards,” she said, before climbing to her feet and pulling her helmet back on over her head. She almost shuddered with relief at the immediate respite from the cold, and as the seals clicked into place and the heating began to circulate again, she could have wept at how much of a difference it made to the pain in her implant site.

Jago was still unconscious, face down on the floor, but she made sure to close the door behind her as she left; she needed every precious moment of freedom she could get before her treachery was discovered. The music was still blaring in the main chamber, and nobody really looked to have moved far; she couldn’t blame them, given the temperature. She swung past the bar on her way out, tossing the bag of credits to the droid. “Drinks are on me,” she called, and it roused a few raucous cheers from those gathered near the bar.

It took every ounce of self control not to break into a sprint, but she made her way calmly from the chamber and up the ramp towards the surface of the glacier. With every passing second, she kept waiting for the shouts of discovery to sound, and for blaster fire to ring out around her ankles. But nothing came to pass, and she picked up the pace as she rounded the corner and moved out of site of the guards, pulling her grappling gun from her belt at an awkward run as she made her way back to her idling speeder.

And all the while, she fought the urge to crow triumphantly. That had been a phenomenal success, as far as most of her missions went. She hadn’t needed to resort to outright violence, she hadn’t gotten injured, she had a good lead for her investigation... frankly, that was a near outstanding success. Things couldn’t be better.

She flew out of the canyon at speed, gunning the bike as soon as the open plains of the valley were spread out before her. She wanted nothing more than to get off this ice bucket now, get back to somewhere civilised and warm. She could go back to her bunk on the supply freighter, sit down with her datapad and work on those files to her heart’s content- stars, this was going to lift her status at the agency for good. Finally!

She found herself musing on the commander’s last words, wondering if the woman had ever encountered that particular toxin before. She’d made sure it was a non-lethal dose, as near as she could, but had the woman developed some kind of immunity? Did she know for sure that she’d be back on her feet within an hour or so? It seemed like such a specific timeframe to threaten her with, ‘ _wait an hour and you’ll see_ ’. Peculiar.

She changed speeders at Onith as before, and then made her way back across the vast expanse of the Whiterock Wastes. She couldn’t even see Aurek Base in the distance, and the daylight was beginning to creep away from the edges of the world, a pale grey enveloping everything. It might have been fascinating, if she wasn’t in very real danger of freezing to death.

And if she hadn’t been in danger of freezing to death, she might have noticed the way the stars winking into existence in the sky above her were not in their natural constellations; in fact, they were rather grid-like in their layout.

She crested a rise, expecting to see the lights of Aurek Base in the distance- and instead threw herself to the side at the last minute to avoid a grey shape in the gloom, her speeder slamming into it at a sickening speed as she went tumbling down the slope end over end. She felt rather than heard the collision, and felt shrapnel patter against her back; some of the larger pieces went soaring past her to fly into the snow, smoking and melting the ice around it.

Panting, half expecting to see an angry whitefang roaring at her, she rolled awkwardly onto her knees, fumbling for her blaster. Instead, she found herself staring at a pair of alien looking droids, both of whom resembled armoured personnel, and who barked something at her in a language she didn’t recognise. The sensors in her implant scrambled to try and translate it, but the row of empty dots on the inside of her visor seemed to imply that wasn’t going to work.

As she stared, both droids lifted their blasters towards her, so she made the only choice that seemed to make sense in this bizarre situation and shot first. They crumbled without any great effort on her part, leaving her winded and bruised in a snowbank in the growing darkness of a Hoth dusk. Wincing, she heaved herself onto her knees, and then to her feet, limping up to the top of the road again and praying to whatever local gods might be feeling generous that her speeder might be intact enough to ride. It was suicide to stay out after dark on Hoth, even with the aid of her emergency kit

To her dismay, the speeder was a smoking wreck, the cold too intense at this hour for open flames to hold for long. Strewn out around the wreckage were the chassis of yet more droids- at least three, that she could make out by counting the limbs. Crouching down, she picked up one of the helmets, turning it over in her hands as she sought to identify it. There were markings in places, etchings that looked like some kind of writing, but just like when the droids had spoken aloud to her, she didn’t recognise the language.

A bloom of light caught her attention, and she looked up towards Aurek Base- only to see instead the vague bloom of an explosion against the gloom, orange and hazy in the distance. She fumbled for her satchel, bringing up her macrobinoculars as quickly as she could as she desperately scanned the horizon.

The daylight was fading quickly, so it took the lenses a moment to focus... but when they did, she felt the panic in her veins freeze in horror, turning to a sludge of paralyzed, icy terror instead.

Aurek Base was overrun, smoke billowing from the wide blast doors and flames licking from the structure despite the cold; there were bodies strewn about, debris still steaming where it had fallen, and more of those droids milled about in greater numbers than she cared to count. There were soldiers in gold, wielding what looked to be lightsabers attached to spears or staffs, an unusual style that she couldn’t recall ever seeing before. Force-users, but how? Who?

As she watched, a single figure in white strode from out of the ruins of the base, foolishly exposed to the elements in armour that looked far more ceremonial than practical. He was humanoid, and like the golden knights, he wielded a lightsaber.

An angry alarm started bleating at her, and something started flashing on the inside of her visor, disrupting her viewing; she lowered the binoculars so that she could focus on the alarm, and if she hadn’t already been on the verge of a panic attack, this wasn’t doing much to help the situation. The sensors in her suit warned her that she only had a half hour left at most before she needed to seek shelter.

She was more than half an hour away from Onith, and that was by speeder.

Assuming Onith was still standing.

Activating the distress beacon on her wrist, she stowed the macrobinoculars in her satchel with the images of Aurek’s mysterious attackers stored in the memory bank, and turned and sprinted into the dark.

* * *

_Some time later..._

A thunderous boom sent Paxton tumbling from his bed, half-awake and entirely naked; the ship rocked dangerously as he sat sprawled on the floor in a daze, silk sheets tangled around his legs as he tried to work out what day it was, and precisely how much he’d had to drink the night before if this was how badly the world was spinning.

Another explosion sounded from nearby, sending the numerous bottles and decanters of alcohol on the far wall crashing to the ground. “My booze!” he howled, staggering to his feet as the deck pitched wildly beneath him, a river of shattered glass and top shelf whiskey flooding towards him. “Fuck!”

He grabbed a fistful of the sheet and held it firmly around his waist, cursing violently as a sliver of glass made its way into the sole of his foot. He could hear return cannon fire now, and he was grateful at least that someone on this fucking rustbucket waste of credits knew how to fire a fucking turret.

The alarms were wailing as he hobbled into the hallway, the sheet trailing damply behind him as he left a trail of single bloody footprints in his wake. “Jehni!” he bellowed, as he made his way towards the bridge. “Bella! What the bloody fuck is going on?”

There was a crackle as the comms kicked into life, and Jehni’s strained voice came echoing through the speakers. “All hands, brace for evasive manoeuvres,” she said, and that was all the warning Paxton had before the hallway suddenly turned sideways, and he went crunching into the wall.

He landed on his mechanical shoulder, and he snarled in pain. “Jehni! Fuck!”

A large, horned head stuck out of the bridge at the end of the hall, and Friendly Rin fixed him with a curious stare.

“You bloody great lizard, what the fuck is going on?”

Rin came lumbering towards him, meaty arms outstretched to both walls to keep his balance as the ship went barrelling through space at impossible speeds. “You hurt, cap’n?” he rumbled, his slow manner of speaking somehow far more irritating right now than it ought to have been.

“Am I fucking hurt, what kind of fucking question is that!” He held his leg up at an awkward angle to expose the bottom of his foot, well aware that doing so exposed the entirety of his balls; it wasn’t like the crew weren’t familiar with what his dick looked like, but it was still undignified. “Does this look fucking hurt to you?”

Rin nodded patiently. “Should get to the medbay,” he said, starting to pick him up.

“Put me down, you great lummox! What the fancy fuck is going on? Who, pray tell, is firing on my ship?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, I’ve got it under control!” Jehni yelled from the end of the hallway from where she was evidently not fine. “Just don’t be mad-”

“I ain’t promising anything!”

“Have we pissed off the White Maw recently, boss? I mean, I know we piss off a lot of people, but this seems specifically a little more-”

He slapped repeatedly at Rin until his lieutenant patiently set him back down again, and he staggered up to the bridge with the tatters of his dignity trailing after him. Jehni was hauling hard on the wheel, zigging and zagging with the sort of consummate ease that he couldn’t manage even on his best days; there was a reason he trusted her with the controls of his baby, after all. He braced himself on one of the overhead panels with his cybernetic arm, activating the magnetic coils so that his grip would hold. “What’ve we got?” he asked grimly, trying to make sense of the dizzying spin of stars and laser fire visible out the front portal.

“One main frigate, two small gunships for support-”

“Goddess’ saggy tits, they sent a whole fleet after us?”

“Like I was saying, did we piss someone off? This seems more, um, excessive than normal...”

He leaned down and clicked on the comms, setting it to broadcast on local frequencies. “This is Captain Paxton Rall of the Obsidian Vulture,” he said curtly. “May I ask why you are so determinedly trying to turn my fine vessel into space debris?”

For a few long painful moments, there was no answer, and he had to acknowledge the very real likelihood that he and his crew were in for a hell of a fight. More than anything, he hated people refusing to own their bullshit- if someone had a reason to come after him like this, he damn well wanted to know why. No respect for a man who shot a rival dead while he slept.

There was another barrage of laser fire along the port side, and he gritted his teeth in frustration. “I repeat, this is Captain Paxton Rall-”

“We heard you, Captain,” came a thickly accented voice, and a moment later the holo display clicked into effect. A tall woman- falleen, if he wasn’t mistaken- stared out at him from across the stars, arms crossed and disdain positively dripping from every pore. “I do not find myself in the mood to talk.”

Paxton braced himself, and drudged up his most charming smile. “But my dear, I am sometimes at my best when I am bereft of words- which, I might add, I find myself in such a state right now, looking upon your exquisite-”

“Shut up,” she said flatly.

“Oh, thank god, it wasn’t just me,” Jehni muttered.

Paxton bit the inside of his cheek. “Simplicity, then. I would appreciate knowing what I have done to warrant your extreme displeasure, captain...?”

He thought she planned not to answer, but after a moment she grunted. “Commander,” she corrected. “Commander Karax of the Crimson Wings.” She looked over her shoulder. “Hold fire.”

 _Thank the goddess for that_. “A pleasure to meet you, Commander,” he said, racking his brain for any memory of having crossed that particular subset of the White Maw. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been in contact with any of the White Maw, let alone this particular gang. “Pray tell, why are you trying to kill me?”

She scoffed. “As if you do not know,” she said coldly.

“I am afraid I am quite at a loss. If you would care to enlighten me, I’m sure we could come to some arrangement that results in both of us walking away happy and alive?”

Commander Karax snorted angrily, her nostrils flaring wide. “A little over a week ago, one of your crew made an attempt on my life at your behest,” she said. “Am I to understand you simply forgot about such an atrocity?”

Paxton blinked, and then blinked again. He ducked his head to the side. “Rin?” he asked under his breath.

“Captain?”

“We tried to kill any of the White Maw commanders lately?”

“No, captain.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said, before turning back to the holo. He smiled endearingly. “I’m afraid you must have me confused with someone else, Commander- we have little interest in the dealings or territories of the White Maw, and nothing but the deepest respect for our comrades in arms in the wild stars-”

Commander Karax snarled something in what he assumed to be Falleen, and it did not strike him as a particularly friendly sentiment. “You are a fool indeed to think me so stupid,” she snarled. “Your little deaf assassin made quite sure we knew the attack was at your command.”

Paxton paused. In the pilot’s seat, Jehni made a noise of revelation. “ _Ohhhh!_ ”

He kicked her chair, out of sight of the Commander on the holo. He cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon?” he said. “Did you say, the assassin was deaf?”

“Yah, captain.” She pulled a datapad from her belt, and pressed a few keys. There was a moment of static, and then a voice began to play. A voice that he would recognise anywhere, because the owner of said voice had begun to haunt his daydreams a little more and more as the weeks went on.

Agent Thiare Tana’s Alderaanian accent was delightful enough by itself, but there was something so charming about the thickness of some of her words; it was so very unique to her. “ _You may call me Lady Stoha,_ ” she said in the recording, “ _and I serve as a member of the Obsidian Vulture, the flagship of his eminence, Captain Paxton Rall._ ”

“Lady Stoha?” Jehni whispered.

... had she really named herself after the stupid pun name he’d given himself back on Alderaan? Had she really done that?

“ _Captain Rall sends his regards._ ” The commander stabbed her finger against the datapad again to stop the recording. “Do you have anything to say for yourself, Rall?” she snapped.

His gutsy little nemesis had gone and started an interfaction war in his name, bold as brass and with every knowledge that news of her actions would make its way back to him. It was the ballsiest fucking thing he’d seen in a long time, and he’d seen his share of risky gambles. And more than that, she’d done it using a stupid cover name that he’d used as well, naming herself Lady to his Lord.

He had absolutely no business being attracted to a cop, but he was so fucking turned on by it all. Thiare Tana was a delight he could never have anticipated.

He smiled. “I do, my dear Commander Karax,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Jehni choked on a laugh.

“I’m sorry my dear Lady didn’t finish the job as ordered,” he said, and then cut the call. “All hands! Prepare for battle!”

If Thiare thought sending a war after him was going to stop him from getting even, she was sorely mistaken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is no official canon on what planets Thexan and Arcann attacked prior to KotFE except for Korriban, so I've got a rough idea in my canon of the path they took through the Outer Rim. Sorry Hoth, it just didn't make sense for you to get a Star Fortress if there wasn't some prior history to Zakuul's interest in the planet.


End file.
